"The Wall"

Marlen Haushofer's female Robinson Crusoe survived because she undertook responsibilities, which is sort of like the opposite of 'the unbearable lightness of being'.

• All I have to rely on is a few meagre jottings; meagre, because I never expected to write this report, and I’m afraid that much that I remember will be different from my real experiences. <> All reports probably suffer from this shortcoming. I’m not writing for the sheer joy of writing; so many things have happened to me that I must write if I am not to lose my reason.
• Baffled, I stretched out my hand and touched something smooth and cool: a smooth, cool resistance where there could be nothing but air. I tentatively tried again, and once more my hand rested on something like a window-pane. Then I heard a loud knocking sound and glanced around before realizing that it was my own heartbeat thundering in my ears. My heart had been frightened before I knew anything about it.
• He had understood that the thing by the spring was not a living human being. <> His howling tugged at me, and something within me tried to force me to howl along with him.
• I slowly felt my way further along the wall, and stuck one piece of wood after the other into the ground. <> When I looked back, I was able to follow the new border down to the stream. It looked as if children had been playing there, a cheerful, harmless spring game.
• I had no intention of getting drunk; I was in desperate search of a medicine to drive the dazed numbness from my head. It occurred to me that I thought of the whisky as my whisky, so that I no longer believed in the return of its rightful owner. This gave me something of a shock.
• I locked the upper rooms as well, and hung the keys on a nail beside the stove. I don’t know why I did all those things; it must have been instinctive. I had to be able to see everything and protect myself against attack. I hung Hugo’s loaded shotgun beside the bed and put the torch on the bedside table. I knew that all the measures I was taking were directed against human beings, and they struck me as ridiculous. But since I had only ever been threatened by human beings before, I couldn’t adapt too quickly.
• Suddenly it seemed quite impossible that I would survive that bright May day. At the same time I knew I had to survive it, and that I had no means of escape. I had to stay quite calm and simply get through it. It wasn’t the first day of my life that I had had to survive like this. The less I resisted it, the more bearable it would be... when my thoughts approached the wall it was as if they too bumped up against a cool, smooth and quite insuperable barrier. It was better not to think about the wall.
• A sheepdog lay unmoving across the doorstep, its head on its paws. <> If this was death, it had come swiftly and softly, almost lovingly. Perhaps it would have been more sensible to have gone to the village with Hugo and Luise.
• * In the meantime I had realized that this cow, while certainly a blessing, was also a great burden. There could no longer be any question of long reconnaissance missions. <> An animal like this wants to be fed and milked, and needs a settled master. I was the owner and the prisoner of a cow. But even if I hadn’t wanted the cow I couldn’t have left her behind. She was dependent on me.
• But all the hunting-dogs in the valley had been called Lynx since time immemorial. The real lynxes had been hunted to extinction so long ago that nobody in the valley had any idea of what they were like. Maybe one of Lynx’s ancestors had killed the last real lynx, and kept its name as a victory prize.
• If I think about my children today, I always see them as five-year-olds, and it strikes me that they’d left my life even then. That’s probably the age at which all children begin to leave their parents’ lives; quite slowly they turn into strangers. But that all happens so imperceptibly that you barely notice it. There were moments when that terrible possibility’ dawned on me, but like any other mother I very quickly suppressed the thought.
• * The two rather unpleasant, loveless and argumentative semi-adults that I had left behind in the city had suddenly become quite unreal. I never mourned for them, only ever for the children that they had been many years before. That probably sounds very cruel, but I can’t think who I should lie to today. I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead.
• * I wash myself daily, brush my teeth, do my laundry and keep the house clean. <> I don’t know why I do that, it’s as if I’m driven by an inner compulsion. Maybe I’m afraid that if I could do otherwise I would gradually cease to be a human being, and would soon be creeping about, dirty and stinking, emitting incomprehensible noises. Not that I’m afraid of becoming an animal. That wouldn’t be too bad, but a human being can never become just an animal; he plunges beyond, into the abyss. I don’t want this to happen to me. Recently that’s what has made me most afraid, and it is out of that fear I am writing my report.
• If the catastrophe had taken place in Beluchistan, we’d be sitting completely unmoved in our cafes, reading about it in the paper. This is like Beluchistan now, a very far-off, foreign country, one whose whereabouts are scarcely known, a country inhabited by people who are presumably not real people at all; underdeveloped and insensitive to pain; numbers and statistics in foreign newspapers. 
• * That was probably their good fortune. Imagination makes people oversensitive, vulnerable and exposed. Perhaps it’s a form of degeneracy. I have never held the shortcomings of the unimaginative against them, sometimes I’ve even envied them. They had an easier and more pleasant life than everyone else... That doesn’t really belong in my report. But I can’t avoid sometimes thinking about things that are completely meaningless to me. I’m so alone that I can’t always get away from useless thoughts. Since Lynx died that’s got a lot worse.
• They didn’t look dead, but rather like things that had never been alive, entirely inorganic. And yet they had once lived, and their warm breath had moved their little throats. Lynx, who was with me as always, turned away and prodded me with his muzzle. He wanted me to go on. He was more sensible than I was, so I allowed him to lead me away from the stone things.
• The greyish-pink sky turned orange and fiery red. It was my first sunrise in the mountains. Only Lynx was sitting beside me, staring into the light as I did. It was a great effort for him not to start barking with joy, as I could see from the twitching of his ears and muscular spasms rippling across his back.
• * It’s only when knowledge about something slowly spreads to the whole body that you truly know. I know too that I, like every living thing, will have to die some day, but my hands, my feet and my guts still don’t know it, which is why death seems so unreal. Time has passed since that June day, and gradually I’m beginning to understand that I can never go back.
• I always wanted to, but I never got around to it, and without Lynx I don’t dare go on expeditions any more. Never again shall I sit above the alpine roses in the midday sun, listening to the great silence.
• I have spent many evenings laying out the old cards. The figures were as familiar to me as if I’d known them for ever. I gave them names, and took to some of them more than others. My relationship with them became as personal as those with the characters in a Dickens novel that you’ve read twenty times.
• An awful lot of people I know seemed to see their watches as little idols, and that always struck me as sensible. If you’re already living in slavery, it’s a good idea to keep to the rules and not put your master in a bad humour. I did not enjoy being a servant of time, artificial human time,
• * Perhaps he would now be sitting around lazily in the hut, sending me off to do the work. The possibility of delegating work must be a great temptation for any man. And why should a man, without the fear of criticism, go on working at all? No, it’s better that I’m alone. And it wouldn’t be good for me to be with a weaker partner, either; I’d reduce him to a shadow and kill him with care.
• * If I did wish to have anyone with me, it would have to be an old woman, someone shrewd and witty, someone I could laugh with sometimes. But she would probably die before me, and I’d be left on my own again. It would be worse than never having known her. That would be too high a price to pay for laughter. Then I’d have to remember her too, and that would be too much. Even now I’m nothing but a thin skin covering a mountain of memories.
• On the fifth day I got an ulcer, and in an attack of despair and rage I cut my gums open with Hugo’s razor. The pain that came when I cut myself was almost pleasant, because it extinguished the other pain for a moment... Sometimes I wake up at three o’clock in the morning, and the thought of those twenty-six teeth enfolds me in a cold despair. They’re fixed in my jaw like time-bombs: I don’t think I’ll ever be capable of pulling one of my own teeth. If pain comes, I shall have to bear it.
• * I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theatre and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in our eyes... That was the price we paid for our ability to love.
• I was simply following an instinct that had been implanted in me and which I could do nothing to fight against if I didn’t want to destroy myself. Our freedom is in a sorry state. In all probability it’s only ever existed on paper. External freedom has probably never existed, but neither have I ever known anyone who knew inner freedom. And I have never found this fact shaming. I can’t see what should be dishonourable about bearing, as all animals do, this burden that is laid upon us; in the end, we die as all animals do.
• Huge nettles grew around the dungheap, an ineradicable nuisance. On the other hand I always needed young nettles to cook as spinach. They were the only vegetable I had. But I didn’t want to use the nettles from the dungheap. I think that was a stupid prejudice
• * The womanliness of my forties had fallen from me, along with my curls, my little double chin and my rounded hips. At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman. My body, more skilful than myself, had adapted itself and limited the burdens of my femininity to a minimum. I could simply forget I was a woman. Sometimes I was a child in search of strawberries, or a young man sawing wood, or, when sitting on the bench holding Pearl on my scrawny lap watching the setting sun, I was a very old, sexless creature... more like a tree than a person, a tough brown branch that needs its whole strength to survive.
• There wasn’t much that I could do without a wheelbarrow. So I opened up the path with the picks, spread the gravel evenly and tamped it firmly down with the shovel. The next cloudburst would wash out new gulleys, and I would fill them up again and beat them down. I could really have done with a wheelbarrow. But Hugo had never thought about wheelbarrows... he had to settle for half-measures which were something of a game, designed to assuage his fears a bit. He was well aware of that, of course, because he was a thoroughly realistic man who sometimes had quite consciously to give his dark fears something to feed on, so that he could work and live his life in peace. Wheelbarrows, as I said, didn’t seem ever to have had a place in his dreams of survival.
• I’m still afraid, because I know that I can live only if I fail to understand certain things. That was, incidentally, the only time that I happened upon the cat with a mouse. She seems only to pursue her shocking and innocent games at night, and I am pleased about that. <> Now she is lying in front of me on the table, and her eyes are as clear as a lake, with fine-branched plants growing on its bed. 
• Incidentally, damp wood has advantages too, it burns much slower and you don’t have to add so much to it. In the evening, if I want the fire to stay lit throughout the night, I always put damp wood on it.
• Lynx was very cheerful, in very high spirits, but an outsider probably wouldn’t have noticed the difference. He was, after all, cheerful almost all the time. I never saw him stay sulky for more than three minutes. He simply couldn’t resist the urge to be cheerful.
• * When I knelt beside her, she was already dead. Lynx stood beside me and started back from his bleeding playmate. I stroked the clammy fur, and felt as if I’d been expecting this day since Pearl had been born. I wrapped her in a cloth, and in the morning I buried her in the forest meadow. The dry wooden floor had thirstily sucked up her blood. The stain has faded, but I’ll never get rid of it.
• She loved life so much, and always did everything wrong, because in our world you can’t love life as much as that with impunity. When she was still alive I found her very strange, and sometimes repulsive. But I’ve almost grown fond of the dead Luise, perhaps because I now have so much time to think about her. In reality I never knew anything more about her than I know about Bella or the cat today.
• Pearl had to die just because one of her ancestors was an overbred angora cat. From the start she had been destined as a victim for foxes, owls and martens. Was I to punish the beautiful living fox for that? Pearl had suffered an injustice, but that same injustice had also befallen her victims, the trout; was I to pass it on to the fox? The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me. And I alone can show mercy.
• from that winter onwards they were cluttered. I only dreamed about dead people, for even in my dreams I knew there were no more living people. 
• I was very wise, but my wisdom had come too late, and even if I’d been born wise I couldn’t have done anything in a world that was foolish. I thought about the dead, and I was very sorry for them, not because they were dead, but because they had all found so little joy in life. I thought about all the people I had known, and I enjoyed thinking about them; they would be mine until the day I died. I would have to clear a safe place for them in my new life if I was to live in peace.
• The wound wasn’t deep, but it bled a lot and I realized how careful I would have to be. It wasn’t easy for me, but I got used to it. People who live alone in the forest have to be careful if they want to stay alive.
• * And then, at last, one wet leg appeared and, immediately after it, another one. Bella was struggling away. Trembling a little with excitement, I tied the two brown legs together and pulled on the rope. I had no luck at all. I didn’t have the strength of two men. As I looked at Bella everything fell into place. I could imagine precisely how the calf lay inside her. It made no sense at all to pull on the front legs, which would have pulled the calf’s head backwards rather than pushing it forwards.
• The wall has become so much a part of my life that often I don’t think about it for weeks. And even if I do think about it, it strikes me as no more strange than a brick wall or a garden fence that stops me going any further. What’s so special about it? An object made of material whose composition is unknown to me. There was always more than enough of that kind of thing in my life. The wall forced me to make an entirely new life, but the things that really move me are still the same as before: birth, death, the seasons, growth and decay.
• Since I’ve been living in the forest I don’t notice myself getting older. There’s nobody there to draw my attention to it, after all.
• * They were a special source of amusement for Lynx, who behaved as if he was their father. Once they realized he was harmless they started to pester him just as much as they did their mother. Sometimes Lynx tired of these pests and felt they should be in bed. Then he carefully carried them to the wardrobe. Hardly had the last one been transported than the first tumbled back into the room. The cat watched him, and if I have ever seen a cat smiling with malice, she was the one. Finally she got up, distributed a few clouts and drove her brood into the wardrobe.
• I often look forward to a time when there won’t be anything left to grow attached to. I’m tired of everything being taken away from me. Yet there’s no escape, for as long as there’s something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it; and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living. If everyone had been like me there would never have been a wall, and the old man wouldn’t have had to lie petrified by his spring. But I understand why the others always had the upper hand. Loving and looking after another creature is a very troublesome business, and much harder than killing and destruction.
• The first day in the meadow was perhaps the happiest day in his life. I left a note on the table: ‘Gone to the Alm’, and then locked up the hunting-lodge. While I was writing the note, I was surprised at the absurd hope that it expressed, but I simply couldn’t help it.
• I realized that I would have to get hold of some meat for Lynx’s sake. I decided, since it had to be done, to do it as soon as possible, particularly since the area was still unfamiliar to me and I couldn’t count on immediate success. It was only on the second day, after four futile hunting expeditions, that I managed to shoot a young stag, and a very disagreeable problem arose. I didn’t have a spring here to cool the meat, so I had to use up the perishable parts promptly and store the rest either boiled or fried in the cool bedroom. Consequently we spent the whole summer alternating between lean and very fat times
• The previous year, when I hadn’t had a long journey to get there, the meadow had almost finished me off. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t even thought about that in the Alm. It was strange; as soon as I was in the valley I thought about the Alm almost with fear or revulsion; but from the pasture I couldn’t imagine living in the valley. It was as if I consisted of two quite different people, one of whom could exist only in the valley, while the other was beginning to flourish in the Alm. It all scared me a little, because I couldn’t understand it.
• While I was absently stroking her flank I suddenly knew that I couldn’t leave. Perhaps it was stupid of me, but that’s just how it was. I couldn’t flee and let my animals down. This decision wasn’t the result of any thought or emotion. There was something planted deep within me that made it impossible for me to abandon something that had been entrusted to me. I calmed down immediately and stopped being afraid.
• I had brought back the last jar of cranberries from the hunting-lodge, and made pancakes without eggs. Even that’s all right if you’re used to it. The end of the hay-harvest seemed to me to be the occasion for such a feast. At that time, however, I had ceased to suffer so much from my desire for unattainable pleasures. There were no longer any external stimuli to feed my fantasies, and the craving slowly passed.
• * I was no longer in search of a meaning to make my life more bearable. That kind of desire struck me as being almost presumptuous. Human beings had played their own games, and in almost every case they had ended badly. And how could I complain? I was one of them and couldn’t judge them, because I understood them so well. It was better not to think about human beings. The great game of the sun, moon and stars seemed to be working out, and that hadn’t been invented by humans. But it wasn’t completed yet, and might bear the seeds of failure within it. I was only an attentive and enchanted onlooker; my whole life would be too short to grasp even the tiniest stage of the game... I had copied the thoughts and actions of other people. The hours on the bench by the house were real to me, an experience of my own, yet they were not the whole. My thoughts almost always raced ahead of my eyes and distorted the true picture.
• Since my childhood I had forgotten how to see things with my own eyes, and I had forgotten that the world had once been young, untouched and very beautiful and terrible. I couldn’t find my way back there, since I was no longer a child and no longer capable of experiencing things as a child, but loneliness led me, in moments free of memory and consciousness, to see the great brilliance of life again. Perhaps animals spend their whole lives in a world of terror and delight.
• But I saw Lynx being killed, I saw the brain swell from Bull’s split skull, and I saw Pearl dragging herself along like a boneless thing and bleeding, and again and again I felt the warm hearts of the deer cooling in my hands. <> That was reality. Because I have seen and felt all that, it’s difficult for me to dream in the daytime.
• Every stone in the path, every little bush presented itself as familiar, beautiful, but a little ordinary compared with the gleaming snow on the rocks. But this familiar ordinariness was what I needed to live, if I wanted to stay a human being. In the pasture something of the cold and breadth of the sky had seeped into me and had imperceptibly distanced me from life. But that was already in the past. While I made my descent into the valley, the butter churn wasn’t the only thing that weighed painfully against my shoulders; all the worries I had dismissed revived. I was no longer freed from the earth, but toiling and overburdened, as befits a human being. And it seemed a good thing to me, and I gladly assumed the heavy load.
• * I worked on peacefully and evenly, without overtaxing myself. I hadn’t managed that in the first year. I simply hadn’t yet found the right rhythm. But then I had very slowly learned a little more, and adapted to the forest. In the city you can live in a nervous rush for years, and while it may ruin your nerves you can put up with it for a long time. But nobody can climb mountains, plant potatoes, chop wood and scythe in a nervous rush for more than a few months.
• There were low, lilac-coloured gentian bushes here and there. They looked as though their blossoms were cut from frail old silk. Sickly, autumnal plants.
• I have never liked All Saints’. The old women’s whispering about sickness and decay, and behind it a malevolent fear of the dead and much too little love. For all the attempts to give a beautiful meaning to the feast, the primeval fear in which the living held the dead was ineradicable. The living had to adorn the graves of the dead in order to forget them.
• I dug a runnel in the garage to allow the waste to flow away, and covered the floor with boards and straw, then I fetched the two bedsteads from the byre, which had always served as Bull’s feeding racks, and as I couldn’t stand the darkness I sawed a window out of the timber wall and, with strips of wood, nailed a window-pane from one of the bedrooms over the opening. Now at least there was a little light in the garage. Then I smeared the cracks in the walls with earth and moss, stuffed hay into the hay-rack and put in a water-tub. And then I fetched Bull... He hadn’t broken anything; he was just being punished for being fully grown.
• At times he would turn back into a big, well-behaved calf and would be playful and affectionate towards me. Often enough over the next few months I cursed the cycle of procreation and conception that had turned my peaceful mother-and-child byre into a hell of loneliness and fitful madness.
• After all we’ve been through together, Bella has become more than my cow, a poor, patient sister who bears her lot with more dignity than I do. I really wish her a calf. It would extend the term of my imprisonment and burden me with new worries, but Bella ought to be allowed to have her calf and be happy, and I won’t question whether it fits in with my plans.
• Only Tiger’s little shade cast a pall over my pleasure in recovering. I think that if he hadn’t run away and the cat hadn’t been ill, my illness wouldn’t have affected me. I had often come home drenched to the skin in the past. But this time I hadn’t had any resistance. Worry had made me weak and a prey to disease. My stay in the alpine pasture had transformed me a little, and the illness continued the transformation. I gradually started to break free of my past and find a new way of organizing things.
• White crow: It can’t know why it’s been ostracized; that’s the only life it knows. It will always be an outcast and so alone that it’s less afraid of people than its black brethren. Perhaps they find it so repugnant that they can’t even peck it to death.
• I left Bull lying where he was. He was too big and heavy. In the summer his skeleton will bleach in the meadow, flowers and grasses will grow through him and he will sink very slowly into the rain–damp earth.
• * I can see that this isn’t the end. Everything goes on. Since this morning I’ve been absolutely sure that Bella will have a calf. And, who knows, perhaps there will be kittens again. Bull, Pearl, Tiger and Lynx will never exist again, but something new is coming and I can’t escape that. If there should come a time when I am without fire, without ammunition, I shall deal with it and find a way... Memories, mourning an fear will remain, and hard work, as long as I live.
• When they are out of sight I shall go to the clearing and feed the white crow. It will already be waiting for me.