Authors: Thomas Bernhard
I wanted to get away from the mill and walked along the river a bit, along the deafening stream of water that rushed ruthlessly out of the gorge and toward the mill. But then I told myself that my melancholy mood would only worsen if I walked any deeper into the gorge, and I turned back.
But didn’t mills, of whatever kind, always send me into a pleasant, in fact a happy mood? I thought.
When I looked at the mill, I saw the funeral procession that had passed by here six or seven years before, one of the most pompous I had ever seen.
If I had to stay in this gorge I would suffocate in no time, I thought. And to think that anyone here could hit on the idea of raising exotic birds.
Now I felt the need to be with my father.
Approaching the mill, I mused that it was associated to this day with counterfeiters and murderers, though all that lay more than a century in the past. The most evil deeds
could be conceived and carried out easily in a place of this sort, I thought; and all at once I felt how uncanny the two miller’s sons were, as well as the young Turk. Why had these people brought this young Turk into the gorge? What crime were they nurturing?
After I had studied the Saurau coat of arms over the entrance, I quickly entered the vestibule. The voices I heard in the house promptly gave me my bearings. I paused at the right-hand stairway when one of the two miller’s sons suddenly called me from behind. He asked me to come with him, and I went out again.
The gorge was now even darker than before, although its atmosphere is always as lowering as before a thunderstorm. These people live continually in this thunderstorm atmosphere, I thought, following the miller’s younger son to an outbuilding. Too rapidly, I crossed a rotten plank over the river behind the miller’s son, fearing at every step that I would lose my balance.
At first I saw nothing in the outbuilding. But then, when I had become adjusted to the darkness and the curious smell, a smell of flesh, I saw lying on a long board across a pair of sawhorses a heap of dead birds. They were from the aviary, I saw at once, the finest exotic birds. The beautiful colors nauseated me. These slaughtered birds were in fact the most beautiful specimens from the cage, and I turned around to the miller’s son with a questioning look.
All three of them, he said, he himself, his brother, and the new young Turk who had been working in the mill only for a few days, had gone to the cage first thing in the morning, even before sunrise (But a sunrise in this gorge is impossible! I thought). They’d taken half of the birds, the finest first, and killed them with as little damage as possible to their precious
plumage. How? They had wound the birds’ necks rapidly around their index fingers several times and squeezed the heads. I counted forty-two birds all together. After they were through with the day’s work, they were going to finish off the rest, the miller’s son said. His uncle, he said, had started raising birds about twenty years ago and lived only for those birds. He had died three weeks ago, and the birds had begun raising a terrible racket. It was driving them half crazy. At first they thought that the birds’ screeching over the death of their protector would let up after a while, or stop entirely, but they had been mistaken. It had only grown more and more unbearable. “You have to realize,” he said, “that that sort of noise sounds a hundred times louder in this gorge.” It was nothing you could get accustomed to, and you couldn’t ask a person to endure it. So yesterday their father had told them they could finish off the birds to shut them up. They had done a lot of thinking about the mode of execution, and finally had hit on the idea of not chopping off their heads like chickens, but doing it so there would be no sign of outward damage. That way they wouldn’t have to part with the birds, the miller’s son said. They’d all grown used to those marvelous birds, even though they weren’t completely daft about them the way their uncle had been. They intended to stuff the birds themselves and fill a whole room, their dead uncle’s room, with them.
He’d had the idea of setting up a bird museum at the mill, the miller’s son said. It hadn’t been easy to get at the birds. When they started taking the first birds out and twisting their necks, the shrieking had increased, of course, but then it had gradually come to a stop. By the time they were done killing this batch, the rest had fallen totally silent.
Now I understood why the birds had been so frightened
when I approached the cage, for from the very first moment I had thought that the birds were reacting unnaturally.
Their faces were all scratched up from capturing the birds, the miller’s son said. But now, with their experience, they would be able to process the remainder much faster and more easily that evening, and by tonight they would have perfect peace.… At first his father had thought of selling the birds alive to a collector, he said, but to find such a collector would have taken too much time and in the meanwhile they would probably have gone out of their minds. It was hard to get to a taxidermist, too; that was why they wanted to stuff the birds themselves in their leisure time. His uncle, the miller’s son said, had had nothing in his head but those birds. He had left a vast number of notes about his birds; undoubtedly they’d be valuable for a bird specialist. (“We’re all fond of making notes!” the miller’s son said.) The miller’s son picked up one of the handsome birds and held it high, so that we could see it well, and described its fine points. The young man apparently knew a good deal about exotic birds, I thought. Possibly all the inhabitants of the mill had concentrated on those birds. He was able to identify them all correctly. Some, he said, came from Asiatic countries, others from the Americas, and still others from Africa. Most of them, however, were Far Eastern island birds, with not a single one from Europe, he said. His uncle had often sat in the aviary for hours, but none of the birds had ever attacked him. They all had names like Kalahari, Malemba, Mitwaba, Ching-tou, Koejijang, Amoy, Druro, Drirari, Cochabamba, Carrizal, and so on. He said he knew the most remarkable facts about birds from the hundreds of ornithology books piled up in his uncle’s room.
But I could stand it no longer in the outbuilding where
those dead birds lay on the board as on a bier. Above all the smell made it impossible for me to stay any longer, and I went out. I distracted the miller’s son, and thus myself, from the dead birds by starting to talk about life in the gorge. Did he know Prince Saurau? I asked. Yes, of course. Sometimes the prince unexpectedly came down into the gorge and visited the mill. He would sit down and say “incredible things.” He always came on foot. When there were parties in the castle, they could be heard down in the gorge, the laughter and music and the shouts of drunken people. But of late there had no longer been any parties at Hochgobernitz, the miller’s son said. The prince was keeping more and more to himself. They had received the mill as a gift from a Saurau who died in the last century. One evening at the castle the prince had made a wager that he would give the mill away directly if he could not shoot a certain twelve-pointer next day in the gorge. He had not shot the twelve-pointer and had forthwith given the mill to the Fochlers, who had been working it for two hundred years. “When the Sauraus make a promise, they keep it,” the miller’s son said. I remembered that my father had said the prince was as crazy as he was rich. My father came out as I approached the front door again with the miller’s son. The miller’s son laughed. Seeing him laughing that way, I also saw him making pseudo-geometric movements with his hands, the movements of twisting birds’ necks.
We now drove deep into the gorge. At its end, where it was darkest, my father said, we would leave the car and walk up to the castle. It was a rather dangerous path, hugging the left wall of the cliff, but he was used to it and I was young and athletic enough to walk it without fear. The prince expects my father every other Saturday. From the
castle you could look down over the whole beautiful countryside, my father said. There was no other point like it in all of Styria for seeing the lay of the land. You could see all the adjacent provinces of Austria from Hochgobernitz, and toward the southeast you could look as far as Hungary. There was a good road leading up to the castle from the other side, but to reach it we would have had to make a detour of more than fifty miles by way of Planhütte.
As we approached the end of the gorge, we talked about the Fochler mill. My father described the miller as a heavy-set man of sixty who was simply rotting beneath the skin; he lay on the old sofa all the time, could no longer walk; and his wife, who to judge by the smell of her mouth was undergoing rapid degeneration of the lobes of her lungs, had water on the legs. A fat old wolfhound ran back and forth between the two, from her sofa to his and back again. Were it not that fresh apples were kept heaped in all the rooms, the smell of the two old people and the wolfhound would be unendurable. The miller’s right leg was decaying faster than his left; he would never stand again. “When a funeral procession moves through the gorge,” my father said, “it’s uncanny.” So he too had once witnessed a funeral in the gorge. The miller’s wife could stand on her legs only for a few moments at a time. The two of them lay in their room almost all the time and occupied themselves with their dog. The animal, because it never went out of the room, was absolutely dangerous in its derangement. One of the two, the wife or the husband, had to hold it whenever my father entered their room. Because of the screeching of the birds in the last few weeks the dog had gone racing back and forth between the two people “like mad.”
By disposing of the birds the people at the mill hoped above all to calm the dog, and thus the calm themselves. The miller had told my father that he had ordered the birds killed off chiefly because of the dog’s condition. Both of them, the miller and his wife, had alternately been holding the dog’s leash day and night. Since they had been condemned to their room for months by their illnesses, they had gradually lost control over their sons. The elder, whom the miller described as prone to violence—he had often hit his mother and threatened to kill both of them—had once attacked his father with a hoe and severely injured him. The boy who had shown me the dead birds in the outbuilding was a weakling, completely at the mercy of his older brother. All the people in the Fochler mill were feeble-minded, not insane, my father said.
At present one of the miller’s wife’s sisters was running the household. She was in Knittelfeld today.
There were four cows in the barn, my father said. I wondered what the cows grazed on, since there was nothing but forest all around.
I said that the “weak son” had shown me the dead birds in the outbuilding. It was curious, I remarked, that we should have come to the mill on the very day the birds had been killed, or rather were being killed.
All the while we were there, I said, I had been reminded of the funeral I had seen on my former visit to the mill.
Even the Fochlers had heard about the killing of the woman in Gradenberg—the murder, they kept saying. But my father had deliberately refrained from saying that he had been involved in the case.
A notary from Köflach wanted to buy their mill, my father
said. To make a summer resort (!) out of it. The miller and his wife had mentioned the matter, but they had no intention of selling.
That was good spring water they had at the Fochler mill, my father said. Then he added: “There is an oil painting in the old Fochlers’ room.” He would guess it to be between three hundred and fifty and four hundred years old. It was not a painting of saints, he said. On the contrary, it represented two naked men standing with their backs to each other but their heads “completely twisted, face to face.” He had long admired the painting, he said, and had always associated a great variety of “rather gruesome” ideas with it. “If you take it down from the wall where it must have been hanging for hundreds of years and get it out of that horrible room and put it against a clean white wall, all its beauty would come out.” The painting was absolutely ugly and at the same time absolutely beautiful, he explained. “It’s beautiful because it’s true,” my father said.
In many Styrian houses, he went on, especially places steeped in darkness, as in that gorge, valuable works of art had been discovered and brought to light in the recent past. They were all gone by now. Gripped by a mania for antiques, city people had systematically robbed the whole country of its art treasures in recent years, and left behind a proletarian wasteland.
The gorge narrowed still more. First hemlock instead of pines stood along the river bank. There must be trout there, my father said. If we weren’t in such a hurry—because before seeing Prince Saurau he also wanted to look in on the Krainer children who lived in one of the low-roofed servants’ houses right below the castle—he would stop and look for trout in the river.
I was feeling horrified by the thought that there were people living in a place situated where that mill was. And what people! The dead birds had all exuded an alien odor of decay, I said. Some people, like those at the mill, I said, were forced to live their lives in the kind of cruel solitude that prevailed in the gorge. They had no choice; they were bound to their house, to their meager source of income, to a river like the one we were now following to its source. Others, I said, like the industrialist, of their own free will deliberately entered such solitude as he and his sister had at Hauenstein. But even as I said that, I thought that no one does anything of his own free will, that it is claptrap to say that men have free will. Suddenly the world seemed to me completely eerie; never before had I felt it to be so eerie as now, while we were still driving into the gorge. Soon we could hardly see anything, but my father had known the road for years. Where nature is purest and most untouched, as here in the gorge, it is at its eeriest.
Had my father noticed, I asked him, that the Turk gave the impression of being utterly terrified? They had put him into the dead uncle’s room, but he had fled it in the middle of the night and gone to the sons’ room, where he had lain alternately in the bed of the one and the other and begged them not to throw him out. They would let the Turk sleep in their beds for a few days, the younger son had said, until he stopped being afraid, until he grew used to the gorge. They couldn’t keep the Turk’s name in mind, I said, nor had I been able to, and so they simply called him Turk. All the miller’s sons knew about him was that he had seven brothers and sisters at home, and parents to whom he wrote, because why otherwise would he have bought so much letter paper in Knittelfeld before he left with the older of the two
sons, who had hired him away from a construction company there? They had not been able to make him understand their reason for killing all the birds. They did not understand him because they did not know a word of Turkish; he did not understand them because he spoke hardly any German. The Turk had been terrified of both of them, the miller’s son had told me, when he saw them wringing the necks of the birds as they were taken out of the cage. He had leaned against the wall of the house absolutely motionless. Of course he might well have thought they were
crazy
. Because it hadn’t entered their minds how brutal that was, they had laid the first corpses right in front of the birdcage, where the other birds could see them, and these first they had killed simply by squeezing their throats, which caused blood to spurt out. But then one of them thought to wind the birds’ necks around the index finger and break the spine; and for that they went behind the cage. The bird swooned anyhow as soon as the neck was vigorously crooked around the finger the first time. You could hear the backbone breaking under the head. Again and again they had called on the Turk to help them finish off the birds just the way they were doing it; they told him to fetch some more birds out of the cage, but he would not. Then, apparently, the Turk had suddenly understood and all alone had killed ten or twelve birds by their method, much more skillfully than they. He had also brought empty flour sacks and covered the birds with them as they lay side by side on the board with their dangling heads.