Gargoyles (7 page)

While we ate, my father again talked affectionately about the child in Hüllberg, then about Bloch. “They’re all problems,” he said. He opened his medical bag and saw that he had forgotten the books he had wanted to borrow from Bloch, the Diderot, the Nietzsche, and the Pascal. But anyway, he remarked, he would not have a chance to do any reading in the next few days. Frau Ebenhöh was taking much of his time. But the habit of visiting her would end soon, for she had only a few more days to live, would surely simply fall asleep. Then he began talking about the schoolteacher, the first person he had visited that morning, who
had died under his hands. The fate of country schoolteachers was bitter, he said. So often they came from a town, no matter how small a one, where they felt easy, into a grim mountain community where everyone was hostile to them. Such transfers were usually made as a punishment. The teachers would lead a more and more wretched, depressed life, all the more hamstrung by the hateful regulations issued by the Ministry of Education. Most of them lapsed fairly soon into an apathy that might at any moment turn to madness. In any case they were people all too prone to regard life as a penance. But now, constantly in surroundings where they were not taken seriously, looked down on by everyone, their initially weak intellects were torn to shreds and they stumbled into sexual aberrations.

For the longest time, my father said, the sad fate of the Salla schoolteacher had preyed on his mind. But he did not want to talk about that case, he said. As soon as these words were out of his mouth, he apparently ceased to feel any need for secrecy, for he went on to say that in the Obdach grammar school there had been a scandal over the teacher’s relations with a
nervous boy
, and the poor fellow had had to leave his post. He sought refuge in the Tyrol, then in Italy, and finally in Slovenia. For two full years, the man had lived like an outlaw, moving among people of foreign speech and subsisting mostly on small thefts. Then he had suddenly come back across the frontier, totally deranged, and had given himself up to justice. He was quickly brought to trial, and the court in Brock sentenced him to two years in jail and two additional years in a milder house of correction. He served his sentence in Garsten. Released (I thought of Frau Ebenhöh’s brother), he had returned to his parents,
who owned a small farm in Salla and who had nursed him lovingly. “Of course you could say that the teacher died of heart disease, of a so-called cardiac rupture—you could make it that simple,” my father said. “But it wasn’t that.”

In the dying teacher’s face my father had clearly seen, he said, a man’s accusation against a world that refused to understand him.

The poor fellow had been twenty-six years old. His parents had had his shroud hanging up in the vestibule for weeks beforehand. “For weeks,” my father said, “whenever I entered the house, the first thing I saw was his shroud.”

The family had been relieved that he had died in the doctor’s presence. They too, like Frau Ebenhöh in Stiwoll, must have regarded their son as a terrible punishment (from God?), my father said.

While we ate, my father also told me the following story about the deceased teacher. Once when he was a boy, his grandmother had taken him along into the deep woods to pick blackberries. They lost their way completely, wandered for hours, and could not find the way out of the woods. Darkness fell, and still they had not found the path. They kept going in the wrong direction all the time. Finally grandmother and grandson curled up in a hollow, and lying pressed close together, survived the night. They were lost all the next day and spent a second night in another refuge. Not until the afternoon of the second day did they suddenly emerge from the woods, only to find they had all along gone in a direction opposite from that of their home. Totally exhausted, they had struggled on to the nearest farmhouse.

This ordeal had quickly brought about the grandmother’s
death. And her grandson, not yet six, had had his entire future ruined by it, my father said.

You could always conclude that the disasters in a man’s life derived from earlier, usually very early, injuries to his body and his psyche, my father averred. Modern medicine was aware of this, but still made far too little use of such knowledge.

“Even today most doctors do not look into causes,” my father said. “They concern themselves only with the most elementary patterns of treatment. They’re hypocrites who do nothing but prescribe medicines and close their eyes to the psyches of people who because of their helplessness and a disastrous tradition entrust themselves completely to their doctors. And most doctors are lazy and cowardly.”

Putting yourself at their mercy meant putting yourself at the mercy of chance and total unfeelingness, trusting to a pseudo-science, my father said. “Most doctors nowadays are unskilled workers in medicine. And the greatest mystifiers. I never feel more insecure than when I’m among my colleagues. Nothing is more sinister than medicine.”

In the last months of his life the teacher had developed an astonishing gift for pen drawing, my father said. The demonic elements that more and more came to light in his drawings shocked his parents. In delicate lines he drew a world “intent upon self-destruction” that terrified them: birds torn to pieces, human tongues ripped out by the roots, eight-fingered hands, smashed heads, extremities torn from bodies not shown, feet, hands, genitals, people suffocated as they walked, and so on. In those last months the bony structure of the young man’s skull became more and more prominent. And he drew his own portrait frequently, hundreds,
thousands of times. When the young teacher talked, the disastrous way his mind was set became apparent. My father had considered taking some of the drawings and showing them to a gallery owner he knew in Graz. “They would make a good exhibition,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who draws the way the teacher did.” The teacher’s surrealism was something completely original, for there was nothing surreal in his drawings; what they showed was reality itself. “The world is surrealistic through and through,” my father said. “Nature is surrealistic, everything is surrealistic.” But he felt that art one exhibited was destroyed by the very act of being exhibited, and so he dropped the idea of doing anything with the teacher’s drawings. On the other hand, he was afraid the schoolmaster’s parents would throw away the drawings or burn them—thousands of them!—from ignorance of how good they were and because they were still frightened, anxious, and wrought up about these drawings. So he had decided to take them. “I’ll simply take them all with me,” he said. He had no doubt they would be handed over to him.

The teacher’s parents must have kept thinking of their sick son’s unfortunate bent whenever they looked at him during his last illness, my father said. “What a terrible thing it is that when you know of some deviation, some unnaturalness, or some crime in connection with a person, as long as he lives you can never look at him without thinking about that deviation, unnaturalness, or crime.”

From his bed the teacher had a view of the peak of the Bundscheck on one side and the rounded top of the Wölkerkogel on the other side. “You can feel this whole stark landscape in his drawings,” my father said.

The teacher’s parents said, however, that during his last
days he had not spoken at all, only looked at the landscape outside his window. But the landscape he saw was entirely different from theirs, my father said, and different from the landscape we see when we look at it. What he depicted was an entirely different landscape, “everything totally different.”

We were not alone at our table for long. An elderly man, obviously the father of the restaurant owner, sat down with us. He kept asking us what we knew about the crime in Gradenberg. He did not let us eat in peace.

Down toward the Fochler mill the valley narrowed in a way that struck even him as sinister, my father said. I recalled that the mill is situated deep in a dark gorge; shortly beyond it the path winds up to the Saurau Castle.

We paid and left. In the restaurant a band of schoolchildren were being fed. They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.

The Fochler mill is situated in the township of Rachau, but can be reached from Rachau itself only by a roundabout route forty miles long. That means that the mill is completely isolated. It lies directly below Saurau Castle, but the castle cannot be seen from the mill.

From Afling we drove directly into the gorge.

As it grew dark, I began thinking of my sister, whose wrist was still in a bandage.

A weekend was too short a time for me to be home from Leoben, my father said. We never got around to having a real talk. He himself, he said, could not have a good influence upon my sister, but possibly I could. Quite independently
from one another, both of us had been thinking about my sister.

He used to watch her when she felt herself unobserved, my father said—when, for example, she stood musing in the garden, always at the same spot, staring fixedly at the wall of the shed. If he called her, she started and went to her room without a word. In his consulting room she was no help to him at all. She had the greatest dislike for everything medical. “In her I see my helplessness most plainly,” he said.

His science had failed him worst of all in the case of his child, he often thought; the most it had ever given him were faulty predications. Sometimes he took my sister along to visit relatives, but she felt ill at ease in any kind of society.

I shifted his attention to a herd of sheep that briefly appeared on the ridge above the gorge.

As we drove deeper into the gorge, it seemed to me that hundreds and thousands of images were crowding into my memory, and I saw nothing more.

He had to visit the mill owner once a week to drain the pus from the man’s ulcerated leg and change the dressing. It might amuse me, he said, while he was attending to this, to look at the aviary of exotic birds behind the mill. Now, as he mentioned the aviary, I remembered an association I had had with the Fochler mill. A funeral procession had passed by the Fochler mill on its way out of the gorge—I think it had probably come down from Saurau Castle—and the birds, hurling themselves in fright against the bars of the cage and disturbed by the intoned prayers of the people, had continually screeched at the funeral procession.

That had also been a Saturday. I reflected that most funerals are on Saturday. Baptisms, weddings, and funerals are almost always on Saturday.

But how different the mood was when we arrived at the mill this time. Two young workmen (“The sons,” my father said) were loading a wagon with sacks of flour. The turbines were making so much noise that we could not hear ourselves speak. I could not understand what my father said to me before he entered the mill.

The shutters were of black iron. There were no flowers to be seen.

Above the front door the Saurau coat of arms could still be distinguished. This whole land must once have belonged to the Sauraus, I think. Castles like Hochgobernitz always owned mills and breweries.

My father had said that Hochgobernitz was situated on the height overlooking the gorge, but I could not see it.

The men carrying and loading the flour sacks had not noticed our arrival.

The river is so noisy here that you can hear nothing else in the whole gorge.

On the wagon stood a third young man, younger than the two others; he looked like one of the Turks, so many of whom are employed in our country nowadays, and in fact he was a Turk. He took the sacks from the shoulders of the miller’s sons and piled them in regular order on the wagon. He was about my age, but not strong enough for the heavy mill work, which they do in the gorge today exactly as they did it centuries ago. But they produce their own electricity from the water of the river. Built adjacent to the mill, rising halfway above the surface of the water, is a power generator.

It occurred to me that the Turk had probably been in the gorge only for a few days. No doubt the miller’s sons have spent most of their time making fun of him, I thought. I felt sorry for him. But at the moment Turks provide the cheapest
labor in our country. That was the only sort they could have hired to work in this gorge. The Turks do the hardest work and put up with everything. He’ll always have a rough time among these people, I thought; unless he promptly leaves, he’s in for years of slavery. They did not give the impression of wanting to make the least thing easier for him. But you’re only imagining that you are the Turk and ascribing your own thoughts to him, I reminded myself. Immediately, I also began relating the Turk to many people in whose field of tension he must exist—it’s always my unfortunate way never to see just one person, the one I am looking at, but everyone with whom he may possibly be connected. Just as it’s my way to look at each thing in conjunction with everything imaginable. I can’t help myself. How destitute the Turk’s life at home must have been for him to end up in this gorge in Central Europe, I thought. The gorge is a cruel betrayal of him.

But probably all this is quite different from the way I am conceiving it, I thought, and unnoticed by any of the three men working I walked around behind the mill, where I imagined the aviary would be.

The cage was even bigger than I remembered it. But it was completely uncared for and held not even half the number of birds I had seen that first time. Have so many of them died? I wondered. The few that were still in the cage, perhaps fifty or so, had fluttered in panic to the rear wall as soon as I appeared. They had no feed and were thirsty. The water bowl by the wall was empty. Everything inside the cage indicated that the person who had cared for the birds was no longer around. Two parrots were shrieking the same words in unison. I could not manage to make out what they were
shrieking. I discovered a hose attached to the fountain in front of the birdcage and filled the bowl with water. The birds all rushed to drink. But everything about them was hostile; their plumage was constantly changing color from their nervousness. A madman must have been raising these birds and been destroyed by it, I thought. For a moment I had the impression that a person was standing behind me, and I turned around, but there was no one. I walked rapidly away from the aviary to the front of the mill where the three young men, though the Turk was more boy than man, were finished loading the sacks of flour. The Turk had just jumped down from the wagon; surprised by my presence, he halted for a moment at the wall of the house, looked searchingly at me, then ran like a flash into the mill.