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Suddenly it seemed quite impossible that I would survive that bright May day. At the same time I knew I had to survive it, and that I had no means of escape. I had to stay quite calm and simply get through it. It wasn’t the first day of my life that I had had to survive like this. The less I resisted it, the more bearable it would be.
It was weeks before she calmed down and seemed to stop being afraid that I might kick her out. Strangely, she soon seemed less suspicious of Lynx than of me. She clearly didn’t expect any nasty surprises from him any more, and started to treat him as a moody wife treats her oaf of a husband.
had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want. That’s probably how it was for everybody else, too. It’s something we never talked about, when we used to talk.
If I did wish to have anyone with me, it would have to be an old woman, someone shrewd and witty, someone I could laugh with sometimes. But she would probably die before me, and I’d be left on my own again. It would be worse than never having known her. That would be too high a price to pay for laughter. Then I’d have to remember her too, and that would be too much.
I didn’t even know how many stomachs a cow has; you learn things like that for your exams and then forget them again.
However hard I tried to get away from these ideas I never really succeeded. I don’t think they were fantasies either, since it was far less likely that I could help the animals to survive in the middle of the forest than that they would die. I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the
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Later I told Lynx about it, for no particular reason, just so that I wouldn’t forget how to talk. For every ill he knew only a single cure, a nice little race in the forest. The cat listens to me attentively, but only as long as I don’t get at all excited. She mistrusts even the merest hint of hysteria, and simply wanders off if I let myself go. Bella responds to everything I have to say by simply licking my face; that’s a comfort, certainly, but it’s no solution.
It’s strange, in fact, how slight my pleasure is every time I complete a task. Once it’s out of the way I forget it, and think about new things to do.
Even at that time I didn’t allow myself much time to recover. That’s how it always was: while I was slaving away I dreamt about how I would rest quietly and peacefully on the bench, but as soon as I finally sat down on the bench I grew restless, and started looking out for new work to do.
I’d like to know why we have this narcotic effect on dogs. Perhaps man’s megalomania comes from dogs. Sometimes I even imagined there must be something special about me that made Lynx almost keel over with joy at the sight of me. Of course there was never anything special about me; Lynx was, like all dogs, simply addicted to people.
I felt that the worries that beset me during the day, about my animals, the potatoes and the hay, were appropriate to the circumstances, and hence bearable. I knew I would overcome them, and was prepared to deal with them. The fears that gripped me at night, on the other hand, struck me as entirely futile; fears of the past and dead things that I couldn’t bring back to life, which held me at their mercy in the darkness of night.
The only way a woman can experience solitude, without judgment and recrimination scuffing up against her peace, is if the rest of the world has come to a complete standstill and there is no one around to see her.
