Gargoyles Read online

  But then my father recalled his early visits to the miner’s child in Hüllberg. He described how he was received cordially and bidden good-by just as graciously after he had spent a quarter of an hour there, calmed and reassured. But this did not mean that what he had said about people like the innkeeper applied solely to the more prosperous natives. The Hüllberg parents and their child were exceptional. On the whole “the poor are twice as brutal, base and criminal as anyone else, and the pressures on them to make them so are far greater.”

  My father did not speak about the schoolteacher who had been the object of his first call that day—did not speak of him, I thought, because the man had died too soon under his hands, before he could have any idea of him. I thought that the teacher had already been forgotten, for after my father talked about the child and its burns once more, and gave a description of the child’s manner of speech, he reverted to the subject of the innkeeper. The innkeeper was waiting for us in the hospital, my father said, and would have to drive us back to Gradenberg in his wagon before going home. Now he was probably in the morgue. My father had meant to go in with him, but it must have slipped his mind. I imagined that right now the attendants in the morgue were giving the innkeeper his dead wife’s clothing, and sure enough the innkeeper was actually waiting for us, with the woman’s clothes bundled under his arm, at the hospital entrance after we had left the lawyer’s and quickly been to the post office and the bank.

  On the way back to Gradenberg my father went over the patients he still had to visit in the course of the day. He mentioned the names Saurau, Ebenhöh, Fochler, and Krainer. Whereas I had already been strongly affected by the things I had experienced in connection with the death of the innkeeper’s wife, my father now no longer showed the slightest fatigue. Sitting beside the innkeeper, who drove the wagon as calmly as if nothing had happened, the two of us pictured, each for himself, the patients still to be visited. Outside Krennhof the innkeeper stopped at a butcher’s and, apologizing, got out to arrange some business matter. While he was gone for a few minutes, my father commented that he had known this fellow from childhood, that only ten years ago he had been still a young man, but now was steadily putting on fat, walked in a disgustingly bowlegged manner of increasing sexual clumsiness, and had become altogether obnoxious. As for the innkeeper’s wife, my father said, each time he visited Gradenberg he had found the woman equally repulsive. When such people had no children, the meaning gradually drained out of their marriage so that it degenerated into something perverse and vicious that was destined to end in abject misery unless some accident, such as this man Grössl’s running amuck, put a stop to it.

  Along the last stretch of the road we had to turn to avoid a herd of cattle. At this point the innkeeper spoke up, saying several times that he had not yet grasped what had happened; it was still unreal to him.

  When we reached Gradenberg, we saw a crowd gathered in front of the inn. The judicial commission had just arrived on the scene. As I got down from the wagon, I noticed curiosity-seekers all over the place, some standing nearby, some at a remove.

  My father told me to wait in front of the inn. He strode rapidly inside to confer with the judicial commission, whose members were assembled in the public room. The inn was filled from top to bottom with officials who were murmuring steadily among themselves. In an open window on the second floor, the bedroom window, I noticed the heads of two constables. I paced back and forth in front of the inn until my father came out with the innkeeper, who was to drive us home. All the miners who had witnessed the killing had been summoned to testify. It was Saturday; the mine was closed. Most of them could no longer reconstruct the incident; they made contradictory statements; but two of them had seen Grössl when he knocked the innkeeper’s wife down. That was enough for them. Despite my father’s prediction, Grössl was still at large. Probably, my father said, he was hiding somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Everyone thought it unlikely that he could escape to any great distance, even though he had enough money to have even fled the country.

  Back home, we got into our car at once. “We’re driving to Stiwoll,” my father said.

  The road from Graden to Kainach was blocked, partly on account of Grössl. But since we were recognized, we were allowed to pass. A case like Grössl’s was naturally a sensation, and the whole region was agog. Everyone was excited by the death of the innkeeper’s wife. The news had spread rapidly through the constabulary headquarters, as we noticed especially in Afling, where we stopped at my uncle’s. My father had brought medicines for my uncle’s wife. We entered the house and called, went down to the lower rooms and into the kitchen, and found that there was not a soul in the unlocked house. My father deposited the medicines on the kitchen cupboard, left a note, and we took our leave.

  A year before my mother’s death, my father said, he had been in Afling with her, at the funeral of one of his old classmates, and she had talked constantly about her own impending death. Whereas he had as yet discovered no signs of her fatal disease, she was already permeated by it; that was something he realized only much later. After that visit in Afling he had observed a mysterious and total transformation in her, which baffled him as a physician. There was an increasing melancholia that gradually infected all of us. He recalled every one of the things she had said, could see the road they had walked on before and after the funeral. It had been this time of year, the end of September. Everything connected with that funeral in Afling was still remarkably distinct to him. Especially on fair days, when the air has a particular transparency and nature is lovely for its tranquility alone, one sorrows for the dead with redoubled force.

  The essential elements of a person, my father said, come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible.

  All through the drive through the Söding Valley my father talked about my mother. His reveries centered on her, he said, rather than his dreams. Her presence often steadied and encouraged him during periods that seemed outwardly to be fully taken up by his medical work. As a result he had been able to reach a clear view of death as a fact of nature. Now he understood her, who had lived beside him so many years and been loved but never understood. You were never truly together with one you loved until the person in question was dead and actually inside you.

  From the day of the funeral in Afling, my father continued, she had often asked him to take her along on his calls. Nowadays this desire on her part no longer seemed so incomprehensible. In the nature of things it had not been possible for her to study the suffering and torment of the world, but from the day of the funeral in Afling on, this subject was constantly on her mind. During this period he had often spoken with her about us children, above all about the difficulty of channeling parental affection into educational lines. But she used often to say to him that we seemed to her more the children of the landscape around us than of our parents. Holding this view, she had felt us, my sister to an even greater degree than myself, to be creatures sprung entirely from nature, for which reason we had always remained alien to her. Because the three of us were completely helpless after her death, my father said, and my sister and I were in the most dangerous phase of development, she twelve and I sixteen years old, he had thought of remarrying. “In fact the thought came to me during the funeral itself,” my father said when we were already in sight of Stiwoll. But the idea had been more and more repressed by our mother inside him.

  As he said this, I remembered the letter I had written to him a few days ago, in which I had tried to sketch the uneasy relationship among us three, between him and me and between him and my sister and between me and my sister. I had written to him fancying that I would receive an answer, and now I realized that no such answer would ever be forthcoming.

  My father will never be able to answer the questions I asked him in that letter.
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br />   Our relationship is difficult through and through, in fact chaotic, and the relationship between him and my sister and between me and my sister is the most difficult, the most chaotic of all.

  In the letter I had tried to define certain things about our relationship by citing seemingly simple but to me extremely important details. In the writing I had taken the greatest pains not to offend my father. Nor to offend anybody. From my years of observation I found it fairly easy to sketch a picture of us that could be considered truthful from all three sides. My letter had been composed very calmly; I did not allow myself to show any excitement, although I did not evade the central matters that concerned me, such central matters, posed as indirect or direct questions, as for example who was to blame for my sister’s most recent attempt at suicide, or for my mother’s early death. I had long wanted to write such a letter and had started on it repeatedly, but had each time been overcome by doubts about the usefulness of this sort of accounting. It had always been impossible for me to write to him. Each time I would immediately become aware of the awkwardness of suddenly expressing in black and white things that for years had only been private thoughts, speculations. Then too I was checked by a reluctance to bring up possibly long-forgotten matters as essential evidence for my view of us. For I would have had to proceed with sincerity and therefore ruthlessness, and yet show consideration for all concerned. That, too, made such a letter impossible for such a long time.

  But on the previous Monday it had suddenly become easy for me to write the letter. In a single draft of only eight pages I set forth my analysis of the whole complex, which culminated in questions of whether there was any way to clarify the condition we were all in, and whether our relations could be improved. When I was done, I looked the text over several times and found nothing that should dissuade me from mailing it. My father must surely have received the letter by Tuesday moining. But up to now he had not so much as mentioned the matter, although it was apparent from his whole manner that he had not only received the letter punctually, but had also read and studied it with the greatest attention and had not forgotten it.

  In Stiwoll, too, as I saw the moment we drove into town, my father was very well known.

  Thanks to his excellent memory, he could address everybody he met by name. He also knew the situation of every individual.

  Whenever he felt that I needed some pertinent information about someone with whom he had exchanged a greeting or a few words, he gave me a brief characterization.

  We walked rapidly through the town to visit a certain Bloch, a dealer in real estate. He liked the man, my father said. Married to a woman of fifty, his own age, the realtor voluntarily stayed on in this dull mountain community, whose natives were by nature hostile to him, and found his consolation in the pleasures of his business.

  There was another doctor in Stiwoll, my father said. But Bloch had relieved this doctor of the lasting shame of having to treat a Jew, which Bloch was, by consulting my father. Bloch’s father had also lived in Stiwoll.

  Between Bloch and my father, despite the distance of fifteen miles and the intervening high mountains, there had developed a friendship that had, as my father put it, “something philosophical about it.” Bloch, he said, occupied the house that had been his father’s, who had been killed by the Germans.

  As I saw at once, this was one of the finest houses in Stiwoll, on the right side of the street that led from the main square. The façade itself pleased me precisely because it looked so neglected, gray in keeping with its actual age, and also rather battered from the last war. As we entered the freshly plastered vaulted hall, I instantly decided that Bloch had good taste.

  He would visit Bloch at least once a week for a longish talk, my father said, a discussion that he or Bloch took turns at leading. I might find it hard to believe, my father said, considering the general tenor of things in Stiwoll, but the two of them conducted “autopsies on the body of nature” as well as “on the body of the world and its history.” They discussed “comparative political science, applied natural history, literary criticism,” and dealt “unsparingly with society and the state.” But in general the main theme in Bloch’s house was politics, and they tended to talk about people more in regard to their political than their private beings. Meeting in a first-floor study, they conducted an analysis of the world on the most stringent intellectual principles, and left no margin for any illusions whatsoever. Most of the time the arts were rather scanted, my father said, but occasionally they would turn to them out of courtesy to Bloch’s wife.

  Bloch was sitting in an office to the right of the vestibule, separated from it only by a glass partition, and dictating with obvious excitement to his secretary. As he later mentioned, he was addressing a letter to the Voitsberg surveyor, whom I also knew. My father tapped on the office window, and Bloch came out. He greeted us pleasantly and led us at once into the study on the second floor. The fact is that nowhere in a rural area have I ever seen so many books all together as in Bloch’s library. Moreover, as I observed, they were all well used, and were not here for their so-called bibliophilic value, which people in German-speaking countries set such ridiculous store by—aside from a Latin edition of the Nuremberg physician Schedel’s world history, of which there are only a few copies in the whole world.

  Bloch asked what had brought my father to Stiwoll at this unusual morning hour. My father said he wanted to return Kant’s Prolegomena and Marx’s Dissertation, both of which he had finished. He took the two volumes out of his medical bag and put them down on the table. Then he mentioned the books he would like to borrow: Nietzsche’s lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a French edition of Pascal’s Pensées, and Diderot’s Mystification. He had to call on a woman named Ebenhöh on Piberweg, he said. Bloch did not know her.

  Since he had nothing else in the house, Bloch poured us glasses of white wine, Klöscher. Early that morning, he said, he had again suffered from one of his “frightful” headaches, but it had vanished after he began working intensively on his business correspondence. He was taking more and more of the headache remedy my father had prescribed for him, he said. And he had not slept the past four or five days. My father warned him against overdoing it with the medicine, which was dangerous to the kidneys.

  Recently, Bloch said, he had managed to buy a sizable property in the vicinity of Semriach. “It took me two years to put over the deal,” he said. A week earlier it had been plow-land, but he saw it as a prime building parcel that could be divided into more than a hundred lots. That way he would be able to dispose of the property quickly. “You have to be able to wait it out,” he said. This was his biggest deal of the year, he added. He asked for a better sedative; my father wrote a prescription. “Naturally I’m not liked,” Bloch said, and my father stood up. They arranged to meet the next Wednesday. For the past two years my father had been seeing Bloch every Wednesday.

  We went to Frau Ebenhöh on foot.

  “Bloch has the art of seeing his life as an easily understood mechanism that he can keep regulated, speed up or slow down, according to his needs,” my father said. “However he uses his powers, the result is always practically useful, which makes the whole thing bearable. He finds pleasure in this art and is always trying to teach it to his family.” Basically, my father said, Bloch was the only person he could talk with in a manner that was never awkward, and also the only person whom he wholly trusted. Bloch had become a friend who meant more than other lost friends, all those others scattered throughout the countryside pretending to be its intelligentsia, exiled in deep, sunless valleys, in small towns and dull marketplaces and villages, accepting their monotonous fate as country doctors in a way that used to pain him when he himself was still a student, but now only repelled him. For all these people, the high point had been their university years, he said. Once discharged into a world disastrously trustful of them, they fell into a horrible familial and consulting-room apathy, irrespective of whether they worked in ho
spitals or in private practice. He was shocked, my father said, by the total submergence of these former classmates, as he discovered whenever he wrote to one or another of them, letters he felt to be increasingly pointless. Lifelong dilettantes, they married much too soon or much too late and were destroyed by their increasing lack of ideas, lack of imagination, lack of strength, and finally by their wives. “I met Bloch just at the moment when I had no friends left, nothing but correspondents connected with me by a shared youth and the shared trustfulness of the world toward us.”

  Now and then, my father said, he would see one or another of them who in the meantime had become totally absorbed in the sexual pecking-order. Such a colleague would sentimentalize about friendship. But these encounters took place nowadays only by chance, at railroad stations or conventions, and he would feel nauseated, my father said, and have to keep a tight grip on himself so as not to show his feelings. At the university and in their period of internship, they used to talk a great deal about research, about the overwhelming sickness of humanity, about discoveries, about making maximal intellectual efforts, about medical science, the pitiable condition of man and the necessity for taking an uncompromising stand. But all that was left of them were well-dressed quacks who traveled much, hurriedly said hello when they ran into each other, and talked about their family problems, about the houses they were building, and obsessively about their cars. Bloch, on the other hand, was a man who did not lose his grip in spite of the wild way history was accelerating its pace, by the hundredfold or thousandfold from year to year.