Gargoyles

My father told me to wait in front of the inn. He strode rapidly inside to confer with the judicial commission, whose members were assembled in the public room. The inn was filled from top to bottom with officials who were murmuring steadily among themselves. In an open window on the second floor, the bedroom window, I noticed the heads of two constables. I paced back and forth in front of the inn until my father came out with the innkeeper, who was to drive us home. All the miners who had witnessed the killing had been summoned to testify. It was Saturday; the mine was closed. Most of them could no longer reconstruct the incident; they made contradictory statements; but two of them had seen Grössl when he knocked the innkeeper’s wife down. That was enough for them. Despite my father’s prediction, Grössl was still at large. Probably, my father said, he was hiding somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Everyone thought it unlikely that he could escape to any great distance, even though he had enough money to have even fled the country.

Back home, we got into our car at once. “We’re driving to Stiwoll,” my father said.

The road from Graden to Kainach was blocked, partly on account of Grössl. But since we were recognized, we were allowed to pass. A case like Grössl’s was naturally a sensation, and the whole region was agog. Everyone was excited by the death of the innkeeper’s wife. The news had spread rapidly through the constabulary headquarters, as we noticed especially in Afling, where we stopped at my uncle’s. My father had brought medicines for my uncle’s wife. We entered the house and called, went down to the lower rooms and into the kitchen, and found that there was not a soul in the unlocked house. My father deposited the medicines on the kitchen cupboard, left a note, and we took our leave.

A year before my mother’s death, my father said, he had been in Afling with her, at the funeral of one of his old classmates, and she had talked constantly about her own impending death. Whereas he had as yet discovered no signs of her fatal disease, she was already permeated by it; that was something he realized only much later. After that visit in Afling he had observed a mysterious and total transformation in her, which baffled him as a physician. There was an increasing melancholia that gradually infected all of us. He recalled every one of the things she had said, could see the road they had walked on before and after the funeral. It had been this time of year, the end of September. Everything connected with that funeral in Afling was still remarkably distinct to him. Especially on fair days, when the air has a particular transparency and nature is lovely for its tranquility alone, one sorrows for the dead with redoubled force.

The essential elements of a person, my father said, come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible.

All through the drive through the Söding Valley my father talked about my mother. His reveries centered on her, he said, rather than his dreams. Her presence often steadied and encouraged him during periods that seemed outwardly to be fully taken up by his medical work. As a result he had been able to reach a clear view of death as a fact of nature. Now he understood her, who had lived beside him so many years and been loved but never understood. You were never truly together with one you loved until the person in question was dead and actually inside you.

From the day of the funeral in Afling, my father continued, she had often asked him to take her along on his calls. Nowadays this desire on her part no longer seemed so incomprehensible. In the nature of things it had not been possible for her to study the suffering and torment of the world, but from the day of the funeral in Afling on, this subject was constantly on her mind. During this period he had often spoken with her about us children, above all about the difficulty of channeling parental affection into educational lines. But she used often to say to him that we seemed to her more the children of the landscape around us than of our parents. Holding this view, she had felt us, my sister to an even greater degree than myself, to be creatures sprung entirely from nature, for which reason we had always remained alien to her. Because the three of us were completely helpless after her death, my father said, and my sister and I were in the most dangerous phase of development, she twelve and I sixteen years old, he had thought of remarrying. “In fact the thought came to me during the funeral itself,” my father said when we were already in sight of Stiwoll. But the idea had been more and more repressed by our mother inside him.