The strudlhof steps, p.20
The Strudlhof Steps, page 20
That’s all well and good. What Geyrenhoff has to say about the Stangelers, including René, is pertinent, but only on a general level. In no way did he instinctively sense the boy’s particular situation, which was that our young friend was struggling—struggling in a more or less distinct form of his own, at that—toward a goal he wasn’t too numb to feel, either. But now, the question is, how shall we describe it? Was it the unity and integrity of his personhood, meaning the process of becoming a person and attendantly for the first time (we’ll go ahead and risk saying it) truly becoming a human being, which is what a young troglodyte would have yearned for as he looked out from his gloomy cave, where all his talents and abilities must surely have been shackled in heavy chains? And is that all? Isn’t there more underneath? If so, then we must attempt to bring it out into the light so that we can identify it as the goal Stangeler had set for himself. Wasn’t he essentially agonizing over ways to force disparate phenomena, circumstances, or internal and external spaces having no basis for comparison onto some common ground so they could be subjected after all to the magical power of comparison, the one power able to master objects through the ordering thread of memory, which would otherwise come apart all over again every time it’s drawn on? Memory, then, remembrance—that’s what it was about for René, and it didn’t matter how young he was! As if on cue, a certain someone now appeared at the other side of the dam, likewise coming from the tennis court (he’d been sent to find Herr von Geyrenhoff and bring him back, because our future chronicler was scheduled to play a singles match soon), a certain someone who was likewise taken up with memory and remembrance and other such items and would go worming and wiggling around inside himself, even if only on occasion.
But before we bring on Lieutenant Melzer for his brief cameo, let’s be even briefer—but let’s get it over with!—as we cast one more sidelong glance at Geyrenhoff. It’s all very neat and tidy when he writes, “I walked away, off to the right, urged by a sudden need, and perhaps also in answer to a desire to be by myself for a little while.” Nothing wrong with that, every word correct but still not entirely true—the “sudden urge” and the “desire to be by myself for a little while.” Very precise. But Geyrenhoff is always putting everything up on a higher plane of intellection. Then, too, he’s very well-bred. Not as ill-bred as someone like that Kajetan, anyway.
When Geyrenhoff left, Melzer sat down next to René on the sand pile.
Just at that moment it occurred to René—or rather it hit him, and hard—that he hadn’t told Geyrenhoff anything about his having encountered that large snake; in retrospect, he now noted his own conduct with astonishment, as something in itself new and strange.
Then he recounted the whole episode to Melzer.
“Yellow cheeks?” his listener asked. “Are you sure that’s what you observed? You are? Then that’s what it was, all right. A grass snake can grow that large—very rarely, but it does happen. You were smart not to try to catch it, René.”
“Why?” René asked eagerly.
“Because you wouldn’t have gotten rid of it so easily. The really large ones, like the one you’re talking about, always wrap themselves around their captor, and they’re strong. That’s what happened to me once. In Neulengbach. You might not have been able to get free, not by yourself. Then you would have had to go home with it coiled around you, and can’t you just picture the screaming from the girls in the kitchen! Everybody would have come running—think of the uproar—they would have brought in the groundskeeper, and the poor animal might have ended up getting hurt. And let’s not even mention your father.”
Melzer smelled like sunshine.
He was deeply tanned, especially on his arms, which his shirt left mostly bare.
His trousers were pure white, too, not cream colored like Geyrenhoff’s, cut very wide, almost like a sailor’s bell-bottoms, and his belt was made of white leather. René took notice of everything about him.
“You know, Herr Melzer,” he said, “as I was watching the snake there in the ravine—I just thought of this right now—it was very peculiar . . .”
“What was peculiar?” the lieutenant asked.
“It was as if I were watching myself.”
“And?” said Melzer, totally unembarrassed.
“I mean the strain and the grace at the same time—the stopping short, the hesitating, the twisting. Like myself on the inside, the deepest, inmost part of me, my most secret thoughts, as they say.”
Melzer stared straight ahead, looking out over the pond.
And suddenly, as if it were rising from the surface of the water, there was the Treskavica landscape, with its bare south slope, and the ride with Major Laska up to the cabin the day before they went bear hunting for the first time. They’d stopped for a rest and dismounted; the major had just offered him a piece of chocolate or some cognac, or whatever it was; and then Melzer had looked inside a hazelnut bush and seen a little snake, a hazel snake, moving in coils. “René!” he called suddenly, turning to face Stangeler and clasping him on the shoulder, “that’s right! I know what you mean! Just think! Exactly like yourself—I was once watching a snake that same way, too, a small one, though . . .”
“Like the convolutions of one’s own brain,” said Stangeler.
A tremendous outcry now went up from the tennis court.
“Three cheers for Grabmayr! Three cheers for Grabmayr! Three cheers for Benno!”
They got up quickly and walked single file as they crossed the dam wall and went up the path.
“Where’s Melzer?” someone called.
Grabmayr was swaying above people’s heads, all covered with sweat, and laughing with his whole thin, tanned face. They were carrying him past the referee’s bench beyond the embankment.
“He beat Semski,” everyone was yelling.
•
A Fluder, or “millrace,” is what Lower Austrians call the capacious trough that directs water to an overshot mill wheel. Into the system for regulating the mountain torrent a sluice gate is set here and there to let the water flow off into the millstream (in the main watercourse, meanwhile, only a thin little trickle ripples along from that point); as the ground keeps dropping steadily, the millstream changes somewhere into the millrace, which now separates from the ground and serves as an aqueduct, reaching out on taller and taller wooden trestles until it is positioned above the wheel; at that point there is a narrow opening at the bottom of the millrace, in the center, whose shape is that of an angled spout nearly as long as an arm and whose function is to bring the water in all its concentrated force up close to the wheel buckets and let it stream in. At the end of every millrace, past the wheel, is an overflow where the excess water plunges down from a good height, like a waterfall, into a trench, through which, its work done, the stream returns to the main watercourse.
And it’s all made of wood. From local trees. Here in the forest valley the planks for the millrace were cut at the lumberyard by a saw that makes a rapid panting sound—one could imagine it as being out of breath all day long, if that panting weren’t so regular—and this lumber saw is powered by the same kind of millrace and wheel as the mill here, for which reason people in the area also call it a sawmill, though the word doesn’t really make sense when you think about it.
And it’s all full of moss. The outer side of the millrace is largely covered with it, and it hangs in wet, dripping beards from the trestles. The wheel casing, a kind of shed inside of which is a terrific roaring and a furious turning—wherever a plank is missing, the heavy spokes can be seen slowly rising and disappearing—over time, this wheel casing has become thickly furred with it and is malachite green. The trench in which the wheel turns is lined with cut stones on the sides, and these walls too are overgrown with moss. The trench has white pebbles on the bottom. When the mill is operating, the water discharged by the wheel comes out from under the casing in little waves whose force of displacement shows they’ve done the job. Beyond the wheel, where the overflow plummets down from the end of the millrace into the trench on its return to the streambed, the hollowing pressure of the water has created a wider and deeper spot, but it’s no more than a small, foaming basin, for the waters around here would not have come down from the high mountains until just a short time before—clear, cold, rushing, more muscular than corpulent, as it were—and here are to be found none of those well-nigh stagnant ponds that back up all the way to the wheel trench so that the wide, heavy buckets are almost submerged again underneath, if it isn’t the case to begin with that the wheel runs undershot overall; none of those millponds as there are in flatter areas, deep, motionless, taken over by plant life, inhabited by animal life, as if purposely made to swamp and flood everything.
The mill doesn’t run all the time. There are only a few days and weeks out of the year when it does, but then not seldom at night, too. It doesn’t clatter, either. That’s just something made up by fellows who take joy in singing all those folk songs about clattering mills; those boys are a type I for one would hate to hang around with, and the more songs they know, the farther away I want to be. The mill doesn’t clatter. It rumbles, thumps, and vibrates. The door stands half open. Now and then the miller can be seen walking through the lower mill room. And yes, he is indeed covered with white dust, so that part is true, isn’t just poetic “nattering”—to use an expression Germans favor—the way it is with the clattering, and to this extent, then, the requirements of the songful types for apt imagery in their lyrics could be satisfied very nicely. What’s more, the miller has to do more to make a living than just be a miller; he’s a small-scale landlord who lives in a cottage thereabouts and does work for all the farmers in the district during those days and weeks. Hence we see something that doesn’t quite add up about his tastes (which doesn’t mean anything’s “wrong with” him in any way); something just doesn’t quite add up about the miller’s tastes—about roaming, to be specific. There could never have been even a question of any such thing, at least not with this one—so forget about Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and its first line, “Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust” (Roaming is the miller’s joy)!—because this miller walks all crooked; his left leg is shorter, so he hobbles. Besides, his name is Klettler, meaning Burrman, and burrs cling. They also stick fast to one another. Life never allows us to arrange it according to our wishes, however, like a neat and tidy little game where we can square everything away—no, all of a sudden there’s a wide gap again, as for example between concepts and what we mean by them (a situation that makes us uneasy) or between people and their names. Here, then, were two people who invited mockery of their name late in life. The Burrmans did stick together for forty-seven years, but then Frau Burrman ran off from her husband in the forty-eighth, close to her seventieth birthday, explaining—for naturally she was questioned by anybody and everybody—in a simple and dignified way that for forty-seven years now he’d beaten her on an average of twice a week and that she’d had quite enough. She wanted to pass her old age in peace and quiet. So that was how the burrs came to separate.
