The Wall

  A few wet days followed. Bella and Bull were in the meadow, covered with delicate little grey drops, grazing or resting side by side. Lynx and Tiger slept through the days, and I sawed up the sticks in the stable. I had to heat the hut. I can go more easily without food than without warmth, and there were enough sticks. The winter storms had torn the branches from the trees, and uprooted the smaller trees. The saw had seen better days and cut very badly, but sticks are easy to saw up and it didn’t cost me a lot of effort. I carried the wood to the hut and stacked it in the little bedroom. I was sorry that there were no twigs to lay down for Bella and Bull, but at that altitude there was no deciduous wood. The byre was clean and dry, though, and they didn’t have to freeze. Having lugged the butter churn down to the valley, I had had to lug it back up even more laboriously. I couldn’t do without it. Bella was giving so much milk that I intended to lay in a supply of clarified butter through the summer. In the pasture her milk became particularly tasty; Tiger seemed to think so too, and gorged himself until he had a little paunch.

  When I combed Bella I sometimes told her how important she was to us all. She looked at me with moist eyes, and tried to lick my face. She had no idea how precious and irreplaceable she was. Here she stood, gleaming and brown, warm and relaxed, our big, gentle, nourishing mother. I could only show my gratitude by taking good care of her, and I hope I have done everything for Bella that a human being can do for their only cow. She liked it when I talked to her. Perhaps she would have liked the voice of any human being. It would have been easy for her to trample and gore me, but she licked my face and pressed her nostrils into my palm. I hope she dies before me; without me she would die miserably in winter. I no longer tie her up in the stable. If something should happen to me she will at least be able to batter down the door and have no need to die of thirst. A strong man could loosen the weak bolt, and Bella is stronger than the strongest man. I have to live with these fears; even if I resist them they constantly flow disruptively into my report.

  After the short rainy spell I still had a few weeks until the hay-harvest. During this time I wanted to recover my strength. It grew warm again, but it was hot only at midday. The nights at this high altitude were bitterly cold. It seldom rained, only after storms, but it rained violently and copiously. After a storm the sun would return to the pasture while the mists hung for days in the valley basin. All the animals flourished and were happy in their freedom, so I could be content as well. Only the thought of the old cat sometimes tormented me. It hurt me that she preferred to stay in the lonely hunting-lodge, rather than being here with me and the creamy milk, stalking through the tall grass at night in search of abundant prey. A short time later I was able to persuade myself that she actually had found her way back to the hunting-lodge. After a heavy rain-shower I went to the valley to hoe the potato-field. When I went into the hunting-lodge I immediately saw the little hollow in the bed. There was no sign of the cat. I stroked the cool bedspread and hoped she would recognize my smell. I don’t know whether she was capable of it, for according to my observations the feline sense of smell isn’t particularly keen. Hearing is their sense. The meat that I’d left behind was untouched and dried up. I might have expected that, as she was much too suspicious to touch a strange piece of meat.

  The potatoes bore pale purple blossoms, and had grown considerably after the rain. The weeds were easy to pull from the loose earth. I heaped the earth up a little around the plants, so it was three o‘clock before I got back to the hunting-lodge, made some tea and prepared something to eat for myself and Lynx. I didn’t get to the pasture until around seven o’clock, and still had to see to Bella and Bull. Once again, Tiger hadn’t touched his little box or his food, and fled furiously into the open. I realized that it was cruel to lock him in. He would never be a house-cat. In future I would leave the bedroom window open for him. Perhaps he would stay calmly at home if he noticed that he was free to come and go as he pleased. Bella and Bull always had to go into the byre, however, if I stayed away for a day. I was afraid they might break the rope if something frightened them, and fall down the scree slope at the edge of the meadow. After I’d done my work in the stable, and Tiger’s mute scorn had made way for a conciliatory mood, I was finally able to lie down.

  The nights in the pasture were always too short. I didn’t dream. The cool night air brushed over my face, everything seemed light and free, and the nights were never entirely dark. As it stayed light for a long time I went to bed later than I did in the valley. Every fine evening I sat on the bench in front of the house wrapped in my loden coat and watched the red glow of evening spread across the western sky. Later I saw the moon rising and the stars flashing. Lynx lay beside me on the bench, Tiger, a little grey shadow, flitted from tussock to tussock in pursuit of moths, and when he was tired he rolled up on my lap under my cape and started purring violently. I didn’t think, I didn’t reminisce, and I wasn’t afraid. I just sat quite still, leaning against the wooden wall, tired and awake at the same time, and looked at the sky. I got to know all the stars; although I didn’t know their names they soon grew familiar. The only ones I knew were the Plough and Venus. All the others remained nameless, the red, green, bluish and yellow ones. If I narrowed my eyes to slits I could see the infinite abysses opening up between the constellations. Huge black hollows behind dense star-clusters. Sometimes I used the binoculars, but I preferred to look at the sky with my naked eye. That way I could see it all at once, while the view through the binoculars was rather confusing. The night, which had always frightened me, and which I had often defied with blazing lights, lost all its terror in the Alm. I had never really known it before, locked in stone houses behind blinds and curtains. The night wasn’t dark at all. It was beautiful, and I started to love it. Even when it rained and a layer of clouds covered the sky, I knew that the stars were there, red, green, yellow and blue. They were always there, even during the day, when I couldn’t see them.

  When it grew cold and the dew fell I finally went into the hut. Lynx followed me sleepily, and Tiger stalked to his bed in the cupboard. I turned my back to the wall and went to sleep. 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. And immediately after that it was morning, Tiger went for a stroll over my body, the light of dawn fell on my face and further away, in the forest, a bird called. At first I’d missed the sleepy chorus of birds that had awoken me in the valley. The birds didn’t sing and twitter in the pasture, they only had bright, hard calls.

  I was awake, and ran barefoot in the dawning day. The meadow was quite still, covered with transparent drops which later, when the sun rose over the forest, gleamed in rainbow colours. I went into the byre to milk Bella and let her and Bull into the meadow. Bella was already awake and waiting for me. Her lazybones of a son still slept, head lolling, the hair on his forehead curled into locks that were damp with sleep. After that I cleaned the byre and then went into the hut to wash, change my clothes and have my breakfast. Lynx and Tiger drank milk still warm from the cow and then ran into the open. All day long the hut door stood open and the sunlight fell on to my bed. If the weather was cool and wet the hut felt uncomfortable to me. It was not much more than a roof over my head then, not a home like the hunting-lodge. But it didn’t rain often, and never for longer than one or two days. Tiger played with little balls of paper, and Lynx slept through in the stove door. I paid a lot of attention to the little tom-cat. He wasn’t little any more, though, he’d grown a lot, and his muscles were very well-developed. His coat gleamed with health and his whiskers grew thick and magnificent. He was quite unlike his mother: stormy, in need of affection and always in a mood to play. His great passion was theatre, always playing the same leading roles: the furious predator, terrible and frightening; the gentle, very young kitten, helpless
and pitiful; the silent thinker, elevated above everyday matters (a role that he couldn’t keep up for more than two minutes), and the severely offended tom-cat, his manly honour wounded. His only audience was myself, for Lynx immediately went to sleep during these performances, since they didn’t involve him. Nor was there the slightest recognizable trace of the gloomy and melancholic brooding that sometimes afflicts adult cats. In the pasture, of course, I had a lot of time to pay attention to Tiger, and that’s how he came to be my playmate. But he was much fonder of his freedom than he was of me. He couldn’t bear to be closed in and went twenty times a day to check that the door or the window was open. It was generally enough for him to make sure, and then he went back to the wardrobe and slept. Lynx had long ceased to be jealous. I don’t think he took Tiger seriously. He did sometimes play with him, he would devote himself to the little one’s games, but he was afraid of his temper tantrums. Whenever Tiger had one of his tantrums and raged through the hut, Lynx looked at me with the expression of a helpless adult, slightly irritated and uncomprehending. But I had to praise him without fail. He lived on my praise and wanted to hear over and over again that he was the best, the most beautiful and the cleverest of dogs. It was as important for him as eating or moving.

  During those weeks in the Alm we all put on a bit of weight; but after the hay-harvest I grew thin again, brown as wood and dried by the sun. But it hadn’t come to that yet. I’d stopped imagining the problems that this hay-harvest would cause me, and felt secure as a somnambulist does. When the time came, everything that needed doing would be done. And like a somnambulist I drifted through the warm and fragrant days and the star-spangled nights.

  Sometimes I had to shoot a deer. It was still an ugly, bloody business, but I managed it without unnecessary misgivings. I very much missed the cold spring. I had to cook the meat, and then put it in earthenware pots in a tub full of cold water in the cool bedroom. I couldn’t put it in the stream, because Bella and Bull drank from that. Tiger preferred raw meat, and when I didn’t have any raw meat left for him he went hunting for mice. He had got to the point where he could look after himself if it came to it. That was a good thing, for there was a chance he might at some point have to get by all on his own and without my help. Back then I was constantly in search of green vegetables. I ate every little plant that smelled pleasant and edible. I made a mistake only once, and got violent stomach-pains. I missed the nettles, and could hardly find any. They didn’t seem to like it in the pasture. In the lowlands it must have been hot and dry all summer. There were three or four violent storms, and storms in the pasture struck me as much more severe than they were in the hunting-lodge, where I felt somewhat sheltered by the tall trees and the mountain rising behind the house. In the Alm we lived in the midst of the raging cloud-masses. I was frightened, as I always am when bombarded by loud noises, and also had a curious feeling of dizziness that I had never felt before. Tiger and Lynx crept shivering into the stove door, something that never occurred to them otherwise. I had to tie Bella and Bull up in the byre and close the shutters. It was a comfort to me that they were together, and could seek refuge in one another if they were frightened.

  Violent as these storms were, the sky was clear the next morning, and the mists billowed only in the valley. The meadow seemed to be floating along on the clouds, a green and damply gleaming ship on the white foaming waves of a turbulent ocean. And the sea subsided very slowly, and the tips of the spruces rose from it wet and fresh. Then I knew the sun would have reached as far as the hunting-lodge as well, and I thought of the cat, living all on her own in the damp basin.

  Sometimes when I watched Bella and Bull I was glad they had no foreboding of the long winter in the byre. They knew only the present, the tender grass, the spread of the meadow, the warm air caressing their flanks, and the moonlight that fell on their bed at night. A life without fear and without hope. I was afraid of the winter, of cutting wood in the cold and damp. I no longer felt any traces of my rheumatic attack, but I knew that it might return in the winter. And still I had to stay mobile at all costs if I wanted to stay alive with my animals. I spent hours lying in the sunshine, trying to store it up for the long cold spell. I didn’t get sunburned, my skin had toughened much too much for that, but my head ached and my heart beat quicker than it should have done. Although I immediately came down to earth and stopped my sunbathing, it had enfeebled me so much that I had to spend a week recuperating.

  Lynx was very discontented because I wouldn’t go into the forest with him, and Tiger complained and tried to tempt me to play. July had come, and I was weak and apathetic. I forced myself to eat and did everything to make myself strong again in time for the hay-harvest. Around the twentieth of July the moon was waxing, and I decided to wait no longer and exploit the good weather. One morning I got up at three o‘clock, milked Bella, who was somewhat indignant about this irregularity, and carried a day’s green fodder and water into the byre. With a heavy heart I left the window open for Tiger and put out meat and milk for him, and after a hearty breakfast, at four o’clock, Lynx and I left the pasture.

  By seven o‘clock I was in the meadow by the stream, swinging the scythe. My scything was still a little stiff, and didn’t have the right swing to it. It was a good thing that the sun didn’t shine here until around nine o’clock, for by then really it was too late for scything. I scythed for three hours, and I found it went better than I’d thought it would after the long walk; better than the previous year, when I had touched the scythe for the first time in twenty years and hadn’t yet grown accustomed to hard work. Then I lay down under a hazel-bush and didn’t stir. Lynx came back from his little foraging expedition and lay down panting beside me. I sat up again with difficulty and drank tea from the flask, then I fell asleep. When I awoke, ants were running over my bare arms, and it was two o’clock. Lynx looked at me attentively. He seemed relieved that I had woken up, and jumped up cheerfully. I felt terribly weary, and my shoulders ached severely.

  The sun cast its full brilliance on the slope. The fresh-cut swathes of hay already lay wilted and dull. I stood up and began to turn them with the fork. The meadow was one great hum of startled insects. I worked slowly, almost drowsily, abandoning myself entirely to the buzzing, hot stillness. Lynx, who had checked that everything was all right with me, trotted to the stream and drank in long, lapping gulps, then lay down in the shade, his head on his paws, his mournfully wrinkled face entirely hidden by his long ears, and dozed away. I envied him.

  When I’d finished turning the hay I went to the hunting-lodge. The hollow of the cat on my bed put me into a slightly better mood. After I’d fed Lynx and eaten a little cold meat myself, I sat down on the bench in front of the house. I called the cat, but she didn’t come. Then I stroked the bed smooth, locked the door and wandered into the mountains.

  It was seven o‘clock by the time I got to the pasture, and I immediately went to the stable and milked the impatient Bella, who was already restless, discomforted by all the milk that had been building up inside her. Then, since it was such a fine day, I let her and Bull into the meadow and tethered them to a post. Tiger was lying on my bed, and greeted me with affection and reproach. He had eaten and drunk this time, because he hadn’t been shut in. I gave him warm milk, had a wash, set the alarm for three o’clock and went to sleep straight away. The alarm went off immediately and I stumbled out of bed. I had left the hut door half open, because Lynx had still been outside in the evening. The moonlight fell on the wooden floor and flooded the meadow with a cold glow. Lynx lay in the doorway; the poor thing had been watching over me and hadn’t dared creep into the stove door. I praised him and stroked him, and together we fetched Bella and Bull from the meadow. I led them to the byre, milked Bella and left water and feed for them. Tiger was still lying in the cupboard, and didn’t stir. As on the previous day we climbed down to the valley with the first light of dawn. The stars were fading, and the first red glow was rising in the east.