The Wall

  The cow patiently complied, having understood that I wanted to help her. The yellow milk spurted on to the earth, and Lynx set about licking it up. The cow gave a great deal of milk, and the unfamiliar grip made my hands ache. All of a sudden the cow was quite content, and leaned down and brought her big mouth close to Lynx’s brown nose. This mutual assessment seemed to be favourable, for both animals were content and calm.

  So there I was in a wild and strange meadow in the middle of the forest and suddenly I was the owner of a cow. It was quite plain that I couldn’t leave the cow behind. It was only now that I noticed bloodstains on her mouth. She had obviously been desperately running against the wall, which was stopping her getting home to her byre and her people.

  There was no sign of those people. They must have stayed in the house when the catastrophe happened. The drawn curtains over the little windows convinced me yet again that all of this had happened in the evening. Not too late, because the old man had just washed himself, and the old woman with the cat had still been sitting on the bench in front of the house. In the early morning, when it’s still cool, an old woman doesn’t sit on the bench by her house with her cat. Also, if the disaster had occurred in the morning, Hugo and Luise would have been home ages before. I considered all this and immediately told myself that considerations such as these were absolutely no use. So I abandoned them and searched through the copse, calling encouragingly for another cow, but nothing stirred. If there had been a bull somewhere in the vicinity, Lynx would have flushed it out a long time ago.

  I had no alternative but to drive the cow back home, over hill and dale. The boundary I had marked out suddenly served a useful purpose. For in the meantime it had grown late; it was about five o’clock in the afternoon, and only narrow shafts of sunlight fell on the glade.

  So the three of us walked home. It was a good thing that I had planted the branches and didn’t have to slow myself down by feeling my way along the wall. I walked slowly between the wall and the cow, continually anxious that the animal might break a leg. But she seemed used to walking in a mountainous landscape. I didn’t have to drive her on ahead of me, but simply made sure that she stayed at a safe distance from the wall. Lynx had already grasped the meaning of my toy boundary, and kept at a safe distance.

  All the way home I didn’t give the wall so much as a thought, I was so preoccupied with my foundling. Sometimes the cow would suddenly stop and start grazing, and then Lynx would lie down nearby and keep a constant eye on her. If she went on for too long, he pushed her gently and she obediently started moving again. I don’t know how right I was, but during the time that followed I sometimes had the impression that Lynx had a very good notion of how cows were to be treated. I think the huntsman must sometimes have used him as a watchdog when he drove his cows to the meadow in the autumn.

  The cow seemed completely calm and happy. After two terrible days she had found a human being, had been freed from her painful burden of milk and hadn’t a thought of running away. Somewhere there had to be a byre that this new human would take her to. Snuffling hopefully, she trotted along by my side. When, with some difficulty, we had crossed the stream, she even speeded up, and in the end it was all I could do to keep up with her.

  In the meantime I had realized that this cow, while certainly a blessing, was also a great burden. There could no longer be any question of long reconnaissance missions.

  An animal like this wants to be fed and milked, and needs a settled master. I was the owner and the prisoner of a cow. But even if I hadn’t wanted the cow I couldn’t have left her behind. She was dependent on me.

  When we reached the clearing, and it was almost dark, the cow stopped, looked backwards and mooed quietly and happily. I led her to the huntsman’s hut. There was nothing inside but two bunk beds, a table, a bench and an oven in the wall. I carried the table into the open, tore the straw sack from one of the beds and led the cow into her new byre. There was plenty of room for a cow. I took a tin pot off the stove, filled it with water and placed it in the empty bed. It was all I could do for my cow that evening. I stroked her, explained the new situation to her and then bolted the door.

  I was so tired that I could barely get myself back to the hunting-lodge. My feet burned in my heavy shoes and the small of my back ached. I fed Lynx and drank cocoa from the thermos-flask. I was too hungry to eat the sandwiches. That evening I washed with cold water at the spring and then went straight to bed. Lynx also seemed to be tired, for immediately after he had eaten he crept into his stove door.

  The following morning wasn’t as unbearable as the previous morning had been, because the minute I opened my eyes I thought about the cow. I was immediately wide awake, but still very fatigued by my new efforts. I had also slept rather late; and the sunlight fell in yellow stripes through the slats of the shutters.

  I got up and set to work. There were a lot of pots and pans in the hunting-lodge, and I chose a bucket as a milking-pail and took it into the byre. The cow was standing quietly by the bed, and greeted me by happily licking my face. I milked her; it was harder than the day before because every bone in my body ached. Milking is an extremely strenuous job, and I would have to get used to it again. But I knew the right grip to use, which was the most important thing as far as I was concerned. Since I had no hay, after I had milked the cow I drove her to the forest meadow and let her graze there. I knew without a doubt that she wouldn’t run away from me.

  Then at last I had my breakfast, warm milk and the stale sandwich from the day before. The whole day, I remember quite clearly, was dedicated to the cow. I arranged the byre as best I could; I spread out green branches for her, since I had no straw, and with her first dung I laid the foundations of a dungheap beside the hut.

  The ‘byre’ was solidly built from tough timbers. Under the roof, in the corner, was a little room that I later stuffed with straw. But back in May there wasn’t any straw as yet, and until autumn I had to make do with fresh branches.

  I thought about the cow as well, of course. If I was especially lucky she would be expecting a calf. But I couldn’t rely on that, I could only hope that my cow would give milk for as long as possible.

  I still saw my situation as a transitory condition, at least that’s what I tried to do.

  I had little notion about cattle-rearing. I had once witnessed the birth of a calf, but I didn’t even know the length of a cow’s gestation. I’ve learned that in the meantime from a farmer’s diary, but I don’t know much more than that to this day, and have no idea how I could find out anything more about it.

  I wanted to take out the little oven in the byre, but later found it to be quite practical. If necessary I could heat up water there. I carried the table and a chair into the garage, where there were a lot of tools. Hugo had always made sure that he had good tools, and the huntsman, an honest, tidy man, had made sure that they were always in working order. I don’t know why Hugo set such great store by the tools. He never touched them himself, but looked at them with great satisfaction every time he visited the place. If it was a fad of his, then that fad was a blessing. It is thanks to Hugo’s mild eccentricities that I am still alive today. Dear old Hugo, God bless him, I’m sure he’s still sitting at the table in the inn with a glass of lemonade in front of him, finally unafraid of illness and death. And there is no longer anyone to send him to those business conferences.

  While I was busy with the byre, the cow stood grazing in the forest meadow. She was a pretty animal, fine-boned, rounded and greyish-brown. She somehow looked cheerful and young. The way she turned her head in all directions when she tore leaves from the bushes reminded me of a graceful, coquettish young woman looking over her shoulder with moist brown eyes. I immediately took the cow to my heart, it made me so happy to look at her.

  Lynx ran about close by me, kept his eye on the cow, drank from the trough at the spring and went off on little hunting expeditions in the bushes. He was his old self again, the old cheerful dog, and seemed to have fo
rgotten his fears of the last few days. He seemed to have got used to the idea that, at least temporarily, I was his master.

  At midday I made soup with erbswurst and opened a tin of corned beef. After the meal I was overwhelmed with fatigue. I told Lynx to keep an eye on the cow for a while, and lay down on the bed with my clothes on, as if under anaesthetic. After everything that had happened I ought not to have been able to sleep at all; but I must say that for the first few days in the hunting-lodge I slept particularly well, until my body had got used to the heavy work. Insomnia only began to bother me much later on.

  At about four o’clock I woke up. The cow had lain down, chewing the cud. Lynx sat on the bench by the house and watched her sleepily. I relieved him of his guard duties, and he went off exploring again. At that time I always grew worried the minute I couldn’t see him. Later, when I knew how much I could rely on him, I completely lost this fear.

  When it grew cool, I put water on the stove to heat. I desperately needed a bath.

  Towards evening I took the cow into the byre, milked her, poured fresh water into the pot on the bedstead and then left her alone for the night. After my bath I wrapped myself in my dressing-gown, drank hot milk and then sat down at the table to have a think. I was amazed that I didn’t feel sad and desperate. I grew so sleepy that I had to rest my head on my hands and almost fell asleep in my chair. But since I couldn’t think after all, I tried to read; one of Hugo’s thrillers. But it didn’t seem to be the right thing; I wasn’t very interested in the white slave trade at that particular moment. Incidentally, Hugo too had regularly dozed off on the third or fourth page of his hard-boiled thrillers. Maybe he used them as a kind of sleeping-potion.

  Likewise, I managed only ten minutes at the most, then resolutely got up, switched off the torch, bolted the door and went to bed. The next morning the weather was cool and cheerless and made me realize that I had to get hold of some hay for my cow.

  I remembered having seen a barn in the meadow by the stream–perhaps there was still a little hay in it. I had no way of using Hugo’s car; he’d taken the key with him when he went away. Only two weeks ago, urged by my daughters, I’d completed a course of driving lessons, and wouldn’t have risked driving to the gorge for any price. I found a few old sacks in the garage, and after working in the stable I set off, laden with these, in search of hay.

  In the barn in the meadow by the stream I actually did find some hay. I stuffed it into the sacks, which I tied together and dragged behind me. But I soon saw that the sacks weren’t going to withstand the journey along the gravel path. So I left two of them lying at the side of the road and carried the other two over my shoulders to the hunting-lodge. I cleared the tools out of the garage and lodged them in the room beside the kitchen, then fetched the sacks I’d left behind and emptied them in the garage.

  I went to fetch hay twice more in the afternoon, and then again the following day. It was now early May, and around this time it can still get chillingly cold in the mountains. As long as it stayed cool and slightly rainy I was able to graze the cow on the forest meadow. She seemed very happy with her new life and patiently put up with my clumsy milking. Sometimes she turned her great head towards me as if she was watching my efforts with amusement, but she stood there quietly and never kicked at me; she was friendly, often even a little bumptious.

  I thought of a name for my cow, and called her Bella. It didn’t fit with the landscape, but it was short and sonorous. The cow soon understood that she was now called Bella, and turned her head when I called her. I would love to know what she had been called before; Dirndl, Gretl, or Grey, perhaps. Actually she wouldn’t have needed a name at all, as she was the only cow in the forest, perhaps the only cow in the region.

  Lynx too had quite an unsuitable name, testifying to the ignorance of the people hereabouts. But all the hunting-dogs in the valley had been called Lynx since time immemorial. The real lynxes had been hunted to extinction so long ago that nobody in the valley had any idea of what they were like. Maybe one of Lynx’s ancestors had killed the last real lynx, and kept its name as a victory prize.

  The gloomy weather merged into rainy days, and later even to snowstorms. Bella stayed in the stall and was given hay to eat, and I suddenly found the time and the peace to think about things. In my diary, Hugo’s diary, that is, there’s a note for the tenth of May: ‘Inventory’.

  That tenth of May was a truly wintry day. The snow, which had at first melted immediately, began to settle, and it was still snowing.

  It started when I woke up feeling entirely unprotected and abandoned. I was no longer physically tired and defenceless against the onslaught of my thoughts. Ten days had passed, and nothing in my situation had changed. For ten days I had anaesthetized myself with work, but the wall was still there and nobody had come to fetch me. I had no alternative but to face reality. Back then I didn’t give up hope, far from it. Even when I finally had to tell myself that I could no longer expect any help, that mad hope stayed within me; a hope against all reason and against my own conviction.

  Even then, on the tenth of May, it seemed certain to me that the scale of the catastrophe was enormous. Everything pointed to it: the absence of rescuers, the silence of human voices on the radio, and what little I had seen through the wall.

  Much later, when almost all hope had been extinguished in me, I still couldn’t believe that my children were dead too, like the old man by the stream and the woman on the bench.

  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 semi-adults 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.

  Shivering in bed I considered what was to be done. I could kill myself, or try and dig my way under the wall, which would probably only have been a more strenuous kind of suicide. Or of course I could stay here and try to stay alive.

  I was no longer young enough to think seriously about suicide. It was chiefly thoughts about Lynx and Bella that kept me from it, and also a certain curiosity. The wall was a riddle, and I would never have managed to leave a riddle unsolved. Thanks to Hugo’s solicitude I had a few provisions that might keep me through the summer, a home, a lifetime’s supply of wood and a cow, who was also an unsolved riddle - and was perhaps expecting a calf.

  I wanted to wait at least for the appearance or non-appearance of this calf before making further decisions. I didn’t give too much thought to the wall. I assumed it was a new weapon that one of the major powers had managed to keep secret; an ideal weapon, it left the earth untouched and killed only humans and animals. It would have been better, certainly, if the animals could have been spared, but that had probably been impossible. As long as they got the people, they hadn’t given a thought to the animals in the course of their slaughter. Once the poison, at least I imagined a kind of poison, had ceased to be effective, it would be possible to seize the country. Judging by the peaceful appearance of the victims, they hadn’t suffered; it all seemed like the most humane piece of devilry ever to have occurred to a human brain.

  I had no idea how long the land would remain infertile, and assumed that once it could be entered again the wall would disappear and the victors w
ould move in.

  Today I sometimes wonder whether the experiment, if indeed that’s what it was, wasn’t just that little bit too successful. The victors are such a long time coming.

  Perhaps there were no victors. There’s no point in thinking about that. A scientist, a specialist in weapons of destruction, would probably have discovered more than I have, but it wouldn’t have been much use to him. For all his knowledge, he could do no different from myself: wait, and try to stay alive.

  After I’d sorted everything out as well as a person with my experience and my intelligence could do, I threw off my blanket and set about heating the house, for it was very cold that morning. Lynx crept out of the stove door, and then it was time to go into the byre and see to Bella.

  After breakfast I started to bring all my supplies down into the bedroom and draw up a list. I have the list in front of me, I don’t want to copy it out, because almost everything I owned will be mentioned in the course of this report. I moved the food from the little room into the bedroom, because it’s cool there even in the summer. The house is built against the mountain, and its back is always in the shade.

  There were enough items of clothing about, and petroleum for the lamp and spirit for the little stove. There were also a bundle of candles and two torches with extra batteries. The medicine cabinet was fully supplied; apart from bandages and painkillers everything’s still there. Hugo had devoted himself to this medicine cabinet with a passion; I think most of the medicines became unusable long ago.

  The things that turned out to be essential were a big bag of potatoes, a lot of matches and ammunition. And, of course, the various tools, a shotgun and a Mannlicher rifle, the binoculars, a scythe, a rake and a pitchfork that had been used to cut the forest meadow for fodder for the deer, and a little sack of beans. Without these things, which I owe to Hugo’s anxieties and to chance, I would no longer be alive.