Gargoyles

What always shocked her, she said, was the impassive way her son described his work in the tannery as monotonous, uninteresting, harmful to his lungs and kidneys. To be sure, the doctors who examined the three hundred Krottendorf tannery workers every two months had so far found nothing wrong with either his lungs or his kidneys. But after ten years of work in Krottendorf, Frau Ebenhöh said, peering out fixedly above her blanket as if looking all the way to Krottendorf, “after ten years of stirring those Krottendorf vats,” changes took place in the lungs and kidneys of the workers. “Fatal ones,” she said. “But my son has the toughest constitution you can imagine.” His “gigantic” body had always seemed to her like something alien, to her just as much as to her husband. After finishing elementary school her son had stayed up in the attic where her brother had hanged himself, sitting torpidly in a chair day after day, staring into space, not saying a word, until her husband’s accident. And right after his father’s funeral, probably because this had been on his mind all along, he’d gone down to Knittelfeld, as she had mentioned, to the first skirt who came along, his wife. “The poor brute.” She often thought that if he had stayed at home she might have saved him nevertheless. She had long felt sorry for him, in his dull helplessness, even though or perhaps because he was so senselessly and without any fault of his own ruining his parents’ lives. But now she no longer felt sorry for him. She was sick of him. Now everything was ending for her in detestation of her own son and his wife and children.

And all the while she talked of her son, she told us, her mind dwelt on the thought that this room of hers was the one she was going to die in. It closed in on her at night, and she was afraid of suffocation. My father distracted her (and us) by talking about the Stub Alp. He described the stunted pines at the top, the cold autumnal air, the wind along the rocky peak, the rush of Lobming Brook down into the valley.

“I take my son with me more often nowadays,” my father said. “He has to get to know people; that’s going to be essential for him.… I live with my children but I can’t see inside them any more than they can see inside me. The difficulties between parents and children are growing worse all the time. After a while there’ll be no overcoming them, do what one will.”

To this day he had not comprehended his wife’s, my mother’s, death. But then everything was always incomprehensible.

Who would have thought, only five years ago, that he would suddenly be alone with me and my sister.

“A good person whom everything depended on suddenly no longer exists,” he said.

He knew I was doing all right at the Mining Academy in Leoben, he said. He wasn’t worried about me, only about my sister. She was so susceptible to every illness, had such a withdrawn life, left to herself with our housekeeper most of the time. And she was so sensitive that some days she was simply incapable of leaving her room.

My father spoke very affectionately about us. Frau Ebenhöh seemed to be listening attentively to him.

He needs someone to listen to him now and then, I thought. I recalled Bloch.

But he rather imagined my sister and I could lean on each other when he was not around, he said.

My interest in the sciences made him happy, he said. He was disturbed by my taciturnity, not alarmed, because it wasn’t morbid, just something I’d arrived at rationally. He thought my physical health was good.

“As far as I know his friends are all healthy young fellows, too,” he said. “I enjoy seeing them whenever I’m in Leoben. I usually have dinner with my son in the Gärner Restaurant. But the worst of it is, I’m always in a hurry.”

He was glad I had chosen my course of studies myself and was pushing on with them, to be finished as soon as possible. “He’s making wonderful progress — he’s better than all the others.”

Leoben was a good place for studying mining engineering, not too big and not too small, a town that offered what was necessary and nothing superfluous, he said. The climate wasn’t as good as up here at home, but still quite healthful. I took advantage of the amusements the town offered, but didn’t go overboard. That above all reassured him. It seemed to him fantastic that I was all of twenty-one.

He rather wished I could go in somewhat more for sports, but I surely knew best what I ought to be doing. All in all, since he didn’t scant me in any way, he could expect that I would act in good faith and fulfill his hopes. To do well always and everywhere took effort.

As for my sister, he’d been noticing things in her that were just like my mother, psychological and physical things. From day to day these elements grew stronger, her character more and more resembling our mother’s.

Inwardly she was never free from fear, and that bothered him. “She has the most sensitive organism imaginable.”