The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

If I think about my children today, I always see them as five-year-olds, and it strikes me that they’d left my life even then. That’s probably the age at which all children begin to leave their parents’ lives; quite slowly they turn into strangers. But that all happens so imperceptibly that you barely notice it. There were moments when that terrible possibility dawned on me, but like any other mother I very quickly suppressed the thought. I had to live, and what mother could live if she recognized this process?

When I woke up on the tenth of May I thought about my children as little girls, skipping hand in hand across the playground. The two rather unpleasant, loveless and argumentative semiadults that I had left behind in the city had suddenly become quite unreal. I never mourned for them, only ever for the children that they had been many years before. That probably sounds very cruel, but I can’t think who I should lie to today. I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead.

I was no longer young enough to think seriously about suicide.

I also resolutely decided to wind the clocks daily, and cross off each day in the diary. At the time it struck me as very important; I was practically clinging to the meager remnants of human routine left to me. Incidentally, I’ve never abandoned certain habits. I wash myself daily, brush my teeth, do my laundry and keep the house clean. I don’t know why I do that, it’s as if I’m driven by an inner compulsion. Maybe I’m afraid that if I could do otherwise I would gradually cease to be a human being, and would soon be creeping about, dirty and stinking, emitting incomprehensible noises. Not that I’m afraid of becoming an animal. That wouldn’t be too bad, but a human being can never become just an animal; he plunges beyond, into the abyss. I don’t want this to happen to me. Recently that’s what has made me most afraid, and it is out of that fear I am writing my report. Once I’ve reached the end I shall hide it well and forget about it. I don’t want the strange thing that I might turn into to find it one day. I shall do all I can to avoid that transformation, but I’m not fool enough to believe with any confidence that what has happened to so many people before me could not happen to me.

Imagination makes people oversensitive, vulnerable and exposed. Perhaps it’s a form of degeneracy. I have never held the shortcomings of the unimaginative against them, sometimes I’ve even envied them. They had an easier and more pleasant life than everyone else.

On the long walk back I thought about my former life and found it unsatisfactory in all respects. I 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.

I knew it, that is, but only in my head, so I didn’t believe it. It’s only when knowledge about something slowly spreads to the whole body that you truly know. I know too that I, like every living thing, will have to die some day, but my hands, my feet and my guts still don’t know it, which is why death seems so unreal. Time has passed since that June day, and gradually I’m beginning to understand that I can never go back.

I’ve never liked clocks, and after a while each of my own mysteriously broke or disappeared. But I concealed my method of systematically destroying clocks even from myself. Today, of course, I know how it all came about. I have so much time to think that I’ll eventually catch on to all my little tricks.

Even now I’m nothing but a thin skin covering a mountain of memories. I don’t want to go on. What will happen to me if that skin gets torn?

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 same way as I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends and the theater and laugh, keeping our secret, consuming worry in our eyes. Each of us knew about it, and that’s why we never discussed it. That was the price we paid for our ability to love.

I still think about this passage when im with my friends

My only teacher is as ignorant and untrained as I am, for my only teacher is myself.

Sometimes the cyclamen blossom as early as July in the mountains, and that is said to presage an early winter. In cyclamen flowers the red of summer combines with the blue of autumn into a pinkish purple, and their fragrance recaptures all the sweetness of the past; but as you inhale it for longer, there is a quite different smell behind it: that of decay and death. I have always considered the cyclamen a strange and rather frightening flower.

Disorganization had never been one of my faults, yet I had rarely found myself in a position to carry out one of my plans, because as sure as fate somebody or something had always turned up to ruin them. If I failed now, it would be my own fault, and I could hold only myself responsible for it.

I’ve become a tiller of the soil, and a tiller of the soil has to plan ahead. I was probably never anything but a frustrated tiller of the soil. Maybe my grandchildren would have turned into frivolous butterflies. My children rejected all responsibility. I’ve stopped giving life and death. Even the solitude that has kept us company for so many generations dies with me. That is not good and it is not bad; it simply is. And how do I spend my days this winter?

Of course there are still a lot of tasks that I can’t manage, but then it wasn’t until I was forty that I discovered I had hands. I can’t cope with too much.

Loving and looking after another creature is a very troublesome business, and much harder than killing and destruction. It takes twenty years to bring up a child, and ten seconds to kill it.

thesis of book

The Alm lay outside of time. Later, during the hay harvest, when I returned from the underworld of the damp gorge, I seemed to be coming back to a land which mysteriously released me from myself. All my fears and memories stayed behind beneath the dark spruces, to attack me every time I went down there. It was as if the big meadow exuded a mild narcotic called oblivion.

Suddenly I had the uncomfortable feeling that I didn’t really belong anywhere, but after a few minutes it went away,

As a child I had always suffered from the foolish fear that everything I could see disappeared as soon as I turned my back on it. No amount of reason could completely banish that fear. At school I would think about my parents’ house and suddenly I would be able to see nothing but a big, empty patch where it had previously stood. I was later prey to nervous anxieties when my family wasn’t at home. I was only really happy when they were all in bed or when we were all sitting around the table. For me, security meant being able to see and touch.

For the first time in my life I was calm, not content or happy, but calm. It had something to do with the stars and the fact that I suddenly knew they were real, but why that was so I couldn’t explain. It just was. It was as if a big hand had stopped the clock in my head.

A colossal task was completed; a task that had lain before me for months like an enormous mountain. Now I was tired and happy. I couldn’t remember having felt such satisfaction since my children were little. Back then, after the strain of a long day, when the toys were cleared away and the children lay in their beds, bathed and dried, back then I’d been happy. I was a good mother to little children. Once they grew bigger and went to school I failed them. I don’t know how it happened, but the bigger the children grew the more insecure I felt with them. I still looked after them as well as I could, but only very rarely was I happy around them. Then I became very dependent on my husband again; he seemed to need me more than they did. My children had gone away; hand in hand, their satchels on their backs, their hair blowing about, and I hadn’t known that that was the beginning of the end. Or perhaps I’d had an inkling. Later on I had never been happy again. Everything changed in a wretched way, and I stopped really living.

But I realized that everything I had thought and done until then, or almost everything, had been nothing but a poor imitation. I had copied the thoughts and actions of other people. The hours on the bench by the house were real to me, an experience of my own, yet they were not the whole. My thoughts almost always raced ahead of my eyes and distorted the true picture.

Just after waking, when my mind is still paralyzed by sleep, I sometimes see things before I can categorize and recognize them. The impression is frightening and menacing. It is only knowledge that turns the chair, with the clothes draped on it, into a familiar object. A moment before, it was something inexpressibly strange and set my heart racing.

There was nothing, after all, to distract me and occupy my mind, no books, no conversation, no music; nothing. Since my childhood I had forgotten how to see things with my own eyes, and I had forgotten that the world had once been young, untouched and very beautiful and terrible. I couldn’t find my way back there, since I was no longer a child and no longer capable of experiencing things as a child, but loneliness led me, in moments free of memory and consciousness, to see the great brilliance of life again.

Sometimes I try to treat myself like a robot: do this and go there and don’t forget to do that. But it works only for a short time. I’m a bad robot; I’m still a human being who thinks and feels, and I shall not be able to shake either habit.

Writing is all that matters, and as there are no other conversations left, I have to keep the endless conversation with myself alive.

In the city you can live in a nervous rush for years, and while it may ruin your nerves you can put up with it for a long time. But nobody can climb mountains, plant potatoes, chop wood and scythe in a nervous rush for more than a few months.

On the twenty-first of October, while the weather was still fine, I fetched home the apples and crab apples.

I sit at the table and time stands still. I can’t see it, smell it or hear it, but it surrounds me on all sides. Its silence and motionlessness is terrible. I jump up, run out of the house and try to escape it. I do something, things race ahead and I forget time. And then, quite suddenly, it surrounds me again. I may be standing in front of the house looking across at the crows, and there it is again, incorporeal and silent, and it holds on to us, the meadow, the crows and myself. I shall have to get used to it, its indifference and omnipresence.

But if time exists only in my head, and I’m the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I’m owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for a meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.

There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished forever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know it’s too late.

An abandoned house is a very sad thing.