Gargoyles

Actually my father meets more and more people in order to be more and more alone.

But he must have sensed that I was giving thought to his almost total isolation. He hated to be an object of pity, and said: “I am exaggerating. It’s very different from what you think. Everything is always very different. Communication is impossible.”

Our path to Frau Ebenhöh’s led through an unfenced orchard whose fallen apples and pears had not been gathered, as I at once noticed. The irregularities in the orchard and garden were suspect, suggesting a person whose inner rhythms were disturbed; the quietude of the garden was of a feverish, morbid kind. All the windows of the one-story house were open. It was sultry. Behind one of those windows lies Frau Ebenhöh, I thought.

I imagined her lying awake and listening for footsteps in the garden, deciding who it was by the sound of the footsteps. The sickroom proved to be exactly as I had imagined it, only gloomier. Her linens lay about everywhere, smelling of the fatal illness to which she was submitting without resistance.

I could see that someone had just been sitting in the large gray-green velvet upholstered easy chair near the sickbed. A neighbor woman? A relative? Whoever it was had been reading to her and had probably gone to the village to do some errand.

These houses are occupied by solitary old women who have been abandoned by their children and have restricted themselves to a minimal life. Entering such houses, I always feel close to suffocation. Flowers by the window in a long-necked glass vase; canary in a cage, eating and chirping heedlessly.

Underwear is no longer hidden, pain is no longer hidden, the sense of smell is dulled, there is no longer any reason to conceal frailties one is alone with.

My father simply walked into the bedroom. He woke the sleeping woman by rattling the birdcage with his stethoscope so that the flustered bird chirruped in alarm.

The smiles of such women who know they are done for and who wake from sleep to find that they are still in this painful world — these smiles are nothing but horror.

Now lying words are exchanged. My father speaks of the summery weather spreading over the entire countryside, of the colors everywhere. He has brought his son along, he says.

I approach the woman, moving into the gloom, then return to the easy chair. I pick up the book and sit down. The Princess of Cleves, I think, The Princess of Cleves in Stiwoll. I leaf through the book thinking: What kind of person is this patient lying here? Who was her husband?

All about the walls I notice large photographs of a bearded man, surely a schoolteacher; all the photographs show the same schoolteacher’s face emerging from a huge beard.

Then my father alludes to her husband the schoolteacher, and talks about the change in weather and what a pity that people cannot make use of this change in weather, because it has come too late.

He talks about common acquaintances in Gratwein, in Übelbach, in Linz and Ligist. About a postmaster in Feistritz, a miller’s wife in Wolfsberg. About a ghastly automobile accident.

Frau Ebenhöh talks about no longer having pain, about a teacher’s wife from Unzmarkt who plays the church organ for her. She says that old pupils come to see her every day.

She points to the array of gifts on the table.

The priest visits her, she says. Her neighbor (“who’s just gone to the village!”) is reading to her, books she did not manage to read during her husband’s lifetime. She often thinks about Oberwölz, where her sister, sick like herself, has been put into an old-age home. “Confined to her bed.” She herself, Frau Ebenhöh, has always been opposed to the home, and whenever her son begins urging that she would be better taken care of in the Stiwoll old-age home, she begins to doubt her children’s kindness. Her grandchildren always come to see her in Sunday clothes that need washing, and play with old newspapers in her room.

Her husband, she says, had been nominated as a socialist candidate for national deputy in 1948, but before the final election lists were posted he’d had his fatal accident, as my father knew.

She remembers that four of her husband’s schoolmates carried the coffin. “All four are dead,” she says. “Died in a short time, one after the other.”

Only two months ago, when she came back from the hospital, everything had centered around fighting for sleep, she went on to say, but now it was a question of fighting to keep awake. The garden had come to a standstill. Nevertheless she had to complain of her neighbor: “Sometimes she doesn’t turn up here for hours.”

My father placed his stethoscope against her clothed chest and listened. He filled out a prescription. I noticed that he made an effort to stretch out the call, for all his eagerness to leave.