In the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Salmon Bay Park extends to the equivalent of four small blocks of rolling landscape with tall evergreen and deciduous trees and grassy areas. It has a playground, a few picnic tables, and toilets, which are sometimes in bad shape. Many families use the picnic tables to celebrate children’s birthdays, when they meet in large groups. Adults stand around talking and children play games or romp around the playground. People bring far more food than even a party crowd can eat, and the trash cans are full when they leave.
On Sunday evenings, a t’ai chi group of maybe eight or nine people meets in the western area of the park and practices a kind of stiff, awkward version of Yang style. At other times, a trio of musicians comes together under a tree. They play from sheet music clipped to music stands so the wind won’t blow it away. Almost always, a gentle wind blows eastward from the shore, even on very hot, stony days. In the summer, most of the single-family homes surrounding Salmon Bay Park are likely much warmer than the park, but one doesn’t see people using it as an outdoor living room where they talk, read, eat, do crafts, play chess, or whatever people do in their houses.
We’ve come to Salmon Bay Park for many years to get a break from the heat in our part of town, for picnics with friends, or to rest on a bench during a long walk. It can feel miles away from the harsh, always transitional city and its horrible traffic. On a recent, boiling Saturday, we brought our folding chairs and table to sit under a big tree whose trunk and roots were splattered with resin. The folding chairs are more comfortable than the park’s filthy picnic tables, all of which were in any case busy with birthday parties. While we sat and read, a handful of people passed, most of them walking dogs. I hiked to the Ballard Market to get sandwiches and potato salad, a stupid idea because it was too hot to enjoy walking. I was glad to be back under the tree, where we ate the food and read a little more.
I was coming to the end of Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer, translated from her Austrian German under the title The Wall and recently re-published for English-only readers. I’m from Köln — “Cologne” — and have lived abroad for much too long, but found the novel easy to take in, without any puzzling Austrian terms I had to look up. It flows beautifully and somewhat monotonously, like a Schubert symphony. It ends calmly, with the protagonist getting ready to feed a white crow whose trust she has won recently.
The plot is simple. An unnamed woman finds herself alone in a rustic cabin in a remote, forested area where people come to hunt. She discovers that she cannot leave because an invisible, impenetrable, transparent wall makes that impossible. She finds that water can find a way under the wall and plans to build a passage allowing animals and maybe even herself to cross. She does not act on this when she understands that all life outside of the wall has ceased and it is not safe to leave its confines. She survives by growing potatoes and green beans, and also hunts deer. After about the first third of the book, the wall is hardly ever mentioned anymore.
Animals provide the protagonist with companionship and support. A loyal dog becomes a trusted friend. When she finds a cow, she relieves her of the pain of not being milked for too long. The cow’s milk becomes a crucial part of the woman’s diet. Eventually, the cow gives birth to a bull. A cat joins the woman and has a litter of kittens after finding a mate in the woods. Not all the young cats survive in the wilderness.
Through the course of about three years, the woman and the animals migrate to a high mountain meadow during the summer, then return to the original cabin for the winter. The woman grows her rudimentary agricultural and husbandry skills, learns how to use her hands as tools, and becomes expert at tending her crops and taking care of the animals. When suddenly a man appears and kills the young bull and the beloved dog, she shoots him and rolls his carcass off a cliff. She and the remaining animals — the old cat and the cow — carry on. The cow even gets pregnant once more. The woman writes the report we’re reading and stops when she runs out of paper. She has enough supplies to last another couple of years.
The novel would simply be a tedious chore to read if the language weren’t as unassumingly beautiful as it is. Every phrase in every sentence follows a consistent rhythm and maintains a certain harmony, an undertone of the inevitable suchness of things that is neither good nor bad. From time to time, the woman briefly reflects on her life, during which she maybe experienced some kind of trauma, but certainly sadness and a sense that she was never quite able to spread her wings. She feels a compassionate sadness for the many millions of dead outside of the wall. She does not obsess about herself and her unusual fate. When she experiences wonder and joy, she does so without exaggeration or verbosity, nor does she get carried away by her emotions. She does not fight what she cannot overcome, but neither does she give up and live in resignation. She assumes responsibility without guilt and allows herself long periods of rest without falling into apathy. When evil intrudes, she stops it and grieves the deaths it wrought, but won’t be overcome by despair. Until the end of her narrative, she keeps engaging with life and taking the best possible care of the animals and herself.
Sometimes, I imagined the novel recast from a conventionally male perspective. No doubt the protagonist would for far too long attack the wall with whatever tools and objects he could find, not giving up until he had injured himself or almost lost his mind. He would maybe try to climb up on it, or spend many pages designing some sort of signaling system to get in touch with anybody still alive outside. He would obsess about the identity of whoever placed the wall and attempt to reach them by heroic means. He would want to dominate the animals instead of forming a kind of family with them. Of course, when a threatening intruder appears, the two men will fight to the death. In short, that male lens would deliver all the elements that make movies and novels annoying and predictable.
Thankfully, Die Wand wasn’t like that.
Die Wand was a powerful, overwhelming experience, a little like hearing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony for the first time or reading the Diamond Sutra in a good, contemporary translation. Its bleakness, the endless monotony of the woman’s everyday chores, her entrapment and the uncertainty regarding a viable future never mar its beauty or the richness of life that is still possible. Instead, it reveals a gorgeous, fundamentally benign and alive universe that comes alive with understanding, forbearance, and letting go of whatever is not helpful. I felt like Haushofer’s writing reached into my heart and tore a little opening.
As far as I know, my mother never wrote anything except short letters and postcards. She expressed her creativity in making costumes and drawing. If she would have been called to write, I imagine she would have come up with something like Die Wand. Like the life of the woman in the novel, hers was governed by necessity, loyalty, love, and acceptance. Work absorbed at least six days a week until her death at fifty-four. Much of it was unpleasant and difficult. She didn’t give up until the very end, without ever becoming cruel or cynical. Most people who knew her would have described her as friendly, insightful, tireless, kind, and funny. The life she lived was far from what she once aspired to, but she never turned dark, not even when her parents for decades treated her with extreme cruelty.
I’ve been thinking about my mother as I’m anticipating a journey to Köln and wonder what I really knew of her. I will always have to live with the wound of not being able to talk with her, of her dying before I was an adult who could meet her on a similar level. Reading Die Wand felt a little like her mind and voice were there, ever so lightly trying to reach me, on the pages and in the park.
There’s no prescription in this. Die Wand or The Wall may leave you cold, but maybe there are other things that touch you deeply. The way a crow swoops down on you as she defends her nest, a tabla player on a tiny boat drifting in the middle of a lake, the feeling of somebody’s hand on your shoulder. Almost anything could unfreeze and open your heart, as long as you’re awake and available. Don’t let the wall win.
A young man with a French bulldog approached on the path near the tree. The dog stopped and refused to walk one more step. Then she pulled on the leash until he let her walk on the grass. He followed her when she came over to me, lightly leaned against my leg, and turned her face up toward mine. The poor dog could barely breathe — thanks to inhumane, cruel breeding for money — and seemed miserable in the heat. She looked at me with a helpless, confused panic in her eyes. She let me touch her; I felt her body trembling. The young man and I exchanged a handful of words. When he slowly moved on, the dog turned away and followed him.
It was time to go for us, too.
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