Gargoyles

She had been busy until two o’clock in the morning, her husband said, serving miners who had already been drunk for several hours and had divided into two hostile groups. Suddenly one of the miners without the slightest provocation struck her on the head, and she had dropped unconscious to the floor. The horrified miners carried her up to the bedroom on the second floor of the inn, her head bumping several times against the banister, and deposited her on her bed. Her husband woke up when the miners opened the bedroom door, and listened, dazed from sleep, to an account of the incident. The suddenly sobered miners wanted him to go to the police and lodge a complaint at once, that very night, against the assailant, a man named Grössl, who had run off but whom they all could identify. The police, including the constable supposedly on duty, had all been asleep, the innkeeper said. But by showering the police station windows with pebbles he had finally roused someone and been admitted. At first the police had advised him to come back in the forenoon to make a statement for the record, but he had insisted that the statement be recorded right then and there, and demanded that some of the constables at least come to the inn with him because his wife was lying there unconscious, the miners were still waiting, and he felt that they, too, should present their statements without delay. But the whole thing had taken too long; by the time he returned to the inn with two of the constables, all the miners except one were gone. His first thought was that he should not have left his wife alone for a moment, for as he entered the bedroom and saw the miner Kolig, who had been there all this time, the most horrible suspicions and imaginings ran through his mind. He did not know the man at all well, was acquainted with him merely from his occasional visits to the inn, and did not regard him as a neighbor in the sense of his being trustworthy. Moreover the miner spoke a Styrian dialect unpleasantly different from the dialect of the vicinity.

Albert Kolig was so drunk that though still on his feet he could not speak even the shortest sentence. The younger of the constables promptly told him to sit down in the armchair in the corner and began questioning him, while the other constable took pictures of the woman lying on the bed as motionless as if she were a corpse. The answers Kolig gave for the record were in fact useless. He could not sit up and was on the point of keeling over when the constable, losing patience, pulled him up and yanked and shoved him out into the hall.

The culprit, Grössl, was reputed to be the kind of man who the moment he entered a tavern was bound to stay until he had made some kind of ruckus. The constables said that it would not be difficult to find him and in view of his previous convictions the chances were that he would be in for a sentence of several years, since the facts of the case were plain enough: The blow on the woman’s head had evidently caused a severe injury, for otherwise she would not be still unconscious. As soon as the older constable spoke the words “severe injury,” everyone realized that a doctor would have to be called. “Meanwhile several hours have passed,” the innkeeper said.

It was already half past four when we arrived in Gradenberg. The innkeeper led us up to the bedroom, where the two constables were standing. My father had all of us go out into the hall. While he was examining the woman — in my brief glimpse of her I had the impression that she had given up the ghost — the two constables in the corridor discussed Kolig, who lay in a drunken stupor on the floor. They said he was dimwitted and was treating his family of six more and more vilely. They did not know what to do with him. When my father emerged from the bedroom, they dragged Kolig away from the stairs, which he had half blocked with his legs. Then they paid no more attention to him.

The woman was in fact seriously injured and had to be taken to the Köflach hospital at once, my father said. He asked the constables to carry her carefully downstairs and place her in the rack wagon.

The constables carried the innkeeper’s wife out of the damp room with its green and brown wallpaper and cheap pine furniture, a room that must have been gloomy even on the brightest day. As the constables cautiously descended the steps with their charge, my father looked at me and then past me, and I thought that his look boded very ill for the innkeeper’s wife.

While I took my seat in the wagon beside the innkeeper, who drove, my father sat behind us next to the patient.