Gargoyles

During the whole ride, which we shortened by cutting across Krennhof, the innkeeper and I did not exchange a word. Because of the early hour the drive went quickly and easily. I had not been in this vicinity for a long time, I realized. I had to think far back to my earliest childhood to catch a glimpse of myself here and there playing by Gradner Brook. It struck me how seldom I had accompanied my father on his rounds, and that ever since my mother’s death I had been left entirely to myself. It is the same for my sister, who must be feeling it even more painfully than I.

In keeping with our mood, I imagine, the innkeeper, who had talked so much on the way to Gradenberg, did not say a word on the way to Köflach. It would hardly have been fitting for me to strike up any conversation with him. If I had understood my father right, there was little hope that the woman would survive the ride to Köflach. But when the hospital attendants lifted her out of the wagon, she was not yet dead. She died, however, while we were still in the hospital, before she could be brought into the only operating room, and her husband sensed the moment of her passing. While the attendants were wheeling her down the corridor, he had held her hand and wept. They did not let him stay with the body, but led him down to the courtyard where, left entirely to himself, he had to wait half an hour for my father. I let him alone, but unobtrusively kept watch over him. Then my father came down and walked about the yard with him, trying to calm him. He spoke to the innkeeper of the things that had to be done now, about arranging the funeral, the inquest, filing a charge against Grössl for manslaughter. It would be wise for him to stay around people now, my father said, not to isolate himself in his anguish, withdraw into his pain. My father said he would take care of certain necessary errands, like going to court, and would accompany him on others to ease his grief, first of all to see his wife who was being moved to the autopsy room.

My father said that he had diagnosed a cerebral hemorrhage, which would have been fatal in any case. He would be receiving the exact details of the autopsy from the district coroner later in the morning. It was of no importance that the innkeeper had not notified him of the fatal blow until three hours after the incident, my father said. The woman could not have been saved. The deceased woman was thirty-three, and my father had known her for years. It had always seemed to him that innkeepers treated their wives with extreme callousness, he said. They themselves usually went to bed early, having overworked themselves all day on their slaughtering, their cattle dealing, their farms. But because they thought of nothing but the business, they left their wives to take care of the taverns until the early morning hours, exposed to the male clients who drank steadily so that as the night wore on their natural brutality became less and less restrained. My father said this to me in an interval when we fell a bit behind the innkeeper, who was walking with us but seemed in a total daze. “All these long drinking bouts end badly,” my father said. “And in this region a high percentage of them end in a fatality. The innkeepers’ own wives are often the victims; the innkeepers set these helpless women to tending the public rooms so they can extract every penny from their drunken patrons by pouring the cheapest brandy into their unresisting guts.”

When we had caught up to the innkeeper again, my father assured him that it would be easy to find Grössl now that the police were informed of it all. No matter where he was holed up, Grössl would not be able to stay hidden long. The innkeeper’s tears and distraught air were affecting precisely because his dealings with cattle and the tavern world had made him the embodiment of the district’s characteristic brutality. But the more my father tried to talk to him, the more pointless the effort seemed. Finally my father contented himself with giving the man the necessary instructions in what I thought a very simple and easily understood way. Then we left him to himself again.