Gargoyles

We were not alone at our table for long. An elderly man, obviously the father of the restaurant owner, sat down with us. He kept asking us what we knew about the crime in Gradenberg. He did not let us eat in peace.

Down toward the Fochler mill the valley narrowed in a way that struck even him as sinister, my father said. I recalled that the mill is situated deep in a dark gorge; shortly beyond it the path winds up to the Saurau Castle.

We paid and left. In the restaurant a band of schoolchildren were being fed. They were given hot soup and admonishments not to make noise. What gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become, I thought as we left the restaurant.

The Fochler mill is situated in the township of Rachau, but can be reached from Rachau itself only by a roundabout route forty miles long. That means that the mill is completely isolated. It lies directly below Saurau Castle, but the castle cannot be seen from the mill.

From Afling we drove directly into the gorge.

As it grew dark, I began thinking of my sister, whose wrist was still in a bandage.

A weekend was too short a time for me to be home from Leoben, my father said. We never got around to having a real talk. He himself, he said, could not have a good influence upon my sister, but possibly I could. Quite independently from one another, both of us had been thinking about my sister.

He used to watch her when she felt herself unobserved, my father said — when, for example, she stood musing in the garden, always at the same spot, staring fixedly at the wall of the shed. If he called her, she started and went to her room without a word. In his consulting room she was no help to him at all. She had the greatest dislike for everything medical. “In her I see my helplessness most plainly,” he said.

His science had failed him worst of all in the case of his child, he often thought; the most it had ever given him were faulty predications. Sometimes he took my sister along to visit relatives, but she felt ill at ease in any kind of society.

I shifted his attention to a herd of sheep that briefly appeared on the ridge above the gorge.

As we drove deeper into the gorge, it seemed to me that hundreds and thousands of images were crowding into my memory, and I saw nothing more.

He had to visit the mill owner once a week to drain the pus from the man’s ulcerated leg and change the dressing. It might amuse me, he said, while he was attending to this, to look at the aviary of exotic birds behind the mill. Now, as he mentioned the aviary, I remembered an association I had had with the Fochler mill. A funeral procession had passed by the Fochler mill on its way out of the gorge — I think it had probably come down from Saurau Castle — and the birds, hurling themselves in fright against the bars of the cage and disturbed by the intoned prayers of the people, had continually screeched at the funeral procession.

That had also been a Saturday. I reflected that most funerals are on Saturday. Baptisms, weddings, and funerals are almost always on Saturday.

But how different the mood was when we arrived at the mill this time. Two young workmen (“The sons,” my father said) were loading a wagon with sacks of flour. The turbines were making so much noise that we could not hear ourselves speak. I could not understand what my father said to me before he entered the mill.

The shutters were of black iron. There were no flowers to be seen.

Above the front door the Saurau coat of arms could still be distinguished. This whole land must once have belonged to the Sauraus, I think. Castles like Hochgobernitz always owned mills and breweries.

My father had said that Hochgobernitz was situated on the height overlooking the gorge, but I could not see it.

The men carrying and loading the flour sacks had not noticed our arrival.

The river is so noisy here that you can hear nothing else in the whole gorge.

On the wagon stood a third young man, younger than the two others; he looked like one of the Turks, so many of whom are employed in our country nowadays, and in fact he was a Turk. He took the sacks from the shoulders of the miller’s sons and piled them in regular order on the wagon. He was about my age, but not strong enough for the heavy mill work, which they do in the gorge today exactly as they did it centuries ago. But they produce their own electricity from the water of the river. Built adjacent to the mill, rising halfway above the surface of the water, is a power generator.