Original subtitles

THE WALL

Today, the 5th of November, I shall begin my report.

I shall set everything down as precisely as I can.

But I don't even know if today really is the 5th of November.

Over the course of the past winter, I've lost track of a few days.

I can't even say what day of the week it is.

But I don't think that is very important.

All I have to rely on is a few meagre jottings;

meagre, because I never expected to write this report.

I'm afraid there will be discrepancies between my report

and my real experiences.

All reports probably suffer from this.

I'm not writing for the joy of writing;

it has just come about that I must write

if I am not to lose my reason.

There is no one here to think about and care for me.

I am all alone

and must try to survive the long, dark winter months.

I have taken on this task

to keep me from staring into the twilight and growing frightened.

For I am afraid.

Fear creeps up on me from all sides,

and I do not want to wait until it gets to me and overpowers me.

I shall write until darkness falls,

and this new, unfamiliar work should make my mind tired,

empty and drowsy.

I'm not afraid of morning, only of the long, gloomy afternoons.

I write on the backs of old calendars

and on faded business notepaper.

The paper belonged to Hugo Ruttlinger,

a great collector and hypochondriac.

This account should actually begin with Hugo:

if it weren't for his collecting and hypochondria,

I shouldn't be sitting here today.

I probably wouldn't even be alive.

It was 3pm before we reached the hunting lodge.

After a snack, as Hugo was starting to nod off,

Luise suggested that he go back to the village with her.

Come on...

We won't be long,

we're up at dawn for the hunt.

The car keys are in the ignition, if you change your mind.

- Come on now! - Yes.

Where is Lynx? Lynx?

The dog can stay!

The stupid beast won't obey.

What nonsense!

You can't handle him.

Lynx?

Lynx, come on!

Good dog! Come on now, heel!

Come on.

Come on, Lynx! Heel!

Come! Come on, Lynx!

Don't be so strict

Lynx, either you obey or you stay here. Then go back! Go on!

Go!

At nine, I decided to go to bed.

I locked the door and took the key with me to my room.

Hey, Lynx. What's up?

They must have stayed in the village.

I was very surprised.

Hugo couldn't stand the short beds at the inn,

and he'd not have been so inconsiderate

as to leave me alone in the lodge overnight.

I set off towards the village with Lynx.

I couldn't imagine what had happened.

I hardly noticed how cool and damp it was in the gorge,

so concerned was I about the Ruttlingers.

Hugo might have had a heart attack.

Because he was a hypochondriac,

we had stopped taking his condition seriously.

I quickened my pace and sent Lynx on ahead.

I hadn't thought to put on my climbing boots,

and followed clumsily along over the sharp stones.

Lynx, what's up?

What's the matter?

Did you hurt yourself?

Did you bite your tongue?

Lynx, come on!

Come on.

Lynx, what's wrong?

Then I heard a thumping sound and glanced around

before realising it was my own heartbeat thundering in my ears.

My heart had been frightened before I knew anything about it.

I tentatively tried again,

and once more my hand rested on something like a window pane.

Suddenly I realised what might have been unconsciously worrying me all along:

the road was entirely deserted.

Someone would have raised the alarm ages ago.

It would have been natural for the villagers

to gather inquisitively by the wall.

Even if none of them had discovered the wall,

Hugo and Luise would surely have bumped into it.

That not a soul was to be seen

puzzled me even more than the wall itself.

I got up three more times and convinced myself

that here, three metres from me,

there really was something invisible, smooth and cool

blocking my path.

I thought it might be an illusion,

but of course I knew that it was nothing of the son.

I could have coped much more easily with momentary insanity

than with this terrible, invisible thing.

The first little farmhouse,

only a cottage, in fact,

was just around the next corner.

At last I could see the cottage.

It lay very still in the sunlight; a peaceful, familiar scene.

Excuse me, I...

Come on, Lynx! Come!

We were in a bad situation, Lynx and I,

and at the time we didn't know how bad it was.

But we weren't lost entirely, because there were two of us.

It simply couldn't be true, things like that didn't happen,

and if they did, then not in little villages in the mountains,

not in Austria and not in Europe.

I know how ridiculous that thought was,

but I must admit that this is what I was thinking.

I woke up refreshed around six o'clock, when the birds started singing.

Although I had barely moved, Lynx knew I was awake,

and came to my bed to greet me.

Suddenly it seemed quite impossible

that I would survive that bright day in May.

At the same time I knew I had to survive it,

and that I had no means of escape.

I had to stay quite calm and simply get through it.

It wasn't the first day of my life that I had had to survive like this.

The less I resisted it, the more bearable it would be.

I no longer remember what I did that morning.

Maybe the hours that followed were so awful I've had to forget them;

maybe I spent them in a state of numbness.

I can't remember.

The next thing I knew, it was around 2pm.

I was walking in the gorge with Lynx.

This time I was better equipped. I had Hugo's binoculars with me, too.

If the man at the well was dead, and there could be no doubt about that,

then everyone in the valley was dead,

as was everything that had been alive.

If this was death, it had come very quickly and gently,

almost lovingly.

Perhaps it would have been wiser

to have gone with Hugo and Louise to the village.

Lyhx!

What's up?

Lynx, come here.

Come!

Come on!

It had dawned on me that the cow might well be a blessing,

but it was also a burden.

An animal like that has to be fed and milked,

and needs someone there all the time.

I was the owner of a cow and its prisoner.

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 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 thought of a name for my cow, and called her Bella.

She didn't actually need a name at all.

She was the only cow in the forest, perhaps the only cow in the region.

See you tomorrow, Bella.

Ten days had passed,

and nothing about my situation had changed.

For ten days I'd been numbing my mind with work,

but the wall was still there,

and nobody had come to get me.

I had no alternative but to face up to reality.

I could kill myself,

or try and dig my way under the wall,

which would probably have been a strenuous form of suicide.

Or 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.

Thanks to Hugo's solicitude I had provisions for the summer,

a home, a lifetime's supply of wood and a cow.

I firmly resolved to wind up the clocks each day,

and to cross off the days from the calendar.

At that time it seemed very important to me.

I was desperately trying to hold on to the remnants of civilised life.

I don't know why.

It's almost an inner compulsion.

Perhaps I'm afraid that if I did otherwise,

I'd slowly cease to be a human being

and soon start to crawl about, filthy and stinking,

emitting incomprehensible sounds.

It wasn't that I was afraid of becoming an animal;

that wouldn't have been so bad.

But a human being can never become an animal;

they will fall into an abyss beyond that which is animal.

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 that I write my report.

On the 30th of May, it rained a warm and fertile rain all day

that forced me to stay inside or get drenched in a moment.

That evening the cat came into my house.

So there were four of us: the cow, the cat, Lynx and me.

Lynx was closest to me,

and soon he wasn't just my dog, but my friend;

my only friend in a world of woe and loneliness.

It's okay, Lynx.

Bella kept me tied to the lodge,

but I wanted to try to have a look around.

I remembered a path that led to a lodge higher up,

and then down into the valley opposite.

I wanted to follow it.

Lynx, heel!

Lynx, wait.

So now I had examined those valleys

that I could reach without staying away for days at a time.

I could still climb up to the pasture and look out over the landscape,

but I couldn't risk going any further into the long mountain range.

Of course somebody would find me if there was no wall over there.

Indeed, they surely would have found me long since.

I could sit quietly at home and wait.

But I kept feeling compelled to do something

to counteract uncertainty.

At about 1pm I sat down to rest.

The forest lay hazily in the midday sun,

and the warm scent from the pines floated up to me.

It was much quieter than in the moonlit night,

as if the forest lay paralysed by sleep beneath the yellow sun.

A bird of prey circled high in the blue sky.

Lynx slept, his ears twitching,

and a great silence descended on me like a bell jar.

I wished I could sit here forever,

in the warmth, in the light,

the dog at my feet and the circling bird above.

When I walked on, I did so with deep regret,

and on the way I slowly changed,

becoming the only creature that didn't belong here:

a human, troubled by chaotic thoughts,

cracking branches with clumsy shoes,

engaged in the bloody business of hunting.

I realise that I never noted down that days on which I'd shot game.

Now l remember I found it too revolting to write about;

it was bad enough that I had to do it at all.

I named the little cat Pearl; she was so white and rosy.

In a few weeks I realised that Pearl, an unkempt little thing,

was on the verge of becoming a beauty.

Pearl was a small miracle,

but even then I knew she'd been born in the wrong place.

A long-haired white cat in the middle of the forest

is condemned to an early death.

She'd no chance at all.

Perhaps that's why I was so fond of her.

If I think back to the first summer,

it is shadowed more by the concern for my animals

than by my own desperate situation.

Catastrophe had relieved me of much responsibility,

but I found, in time, that it placed a new burden upon me.

Once I was able to assess the situation a little,

I'd long since ceased being able to change anything about it.

I don't think my behaviour was due to weakness or sentimentality.

I was simply following an instinct that had been implanted in me

which I could not combat

if I didn't want to destroy myself.

I can't see what should be dishonourable

about bearing a burden, as all animals must.

In the end, we die as all animals do.

I don't even know what honour is.

Being born and dying is not a matter of honour.

It happens to all creatures

and has no meaning beyond that.

On the 20th of July I started to harvest the hay.

It took me three weeks to harvest the meadow.

This wasn't only the weather's fault,

but also that of my clumsiness and physical weakness.

I was overcome by a wave of despair,

and, for the first time, I understood quite clearly

what a blow it was I had taken.

I don't know what would have happened

if responsibility for my animals hadn't forced me

to do at least the most necessary things.

I don't like remembering that time.

It was 14 days before I could pull myself together

and start living again.

Autumn was always my favourite season,

although I never felt physically very well.

In the daytime I was tired yet wide awake,

and at night I lay for hours in restless half-sleep

and my dreams were unusually confused and vivid.

My autumnal malaise didn't spare me in the forest, either,

but since I could hardly afford it, it took a less extreme form.

Perhaps I didn't have the time to notice it.

Lynx was very cheerful, in very high spirits

though an outsider wouldn't have noticed.

He was, after all, cheerful almost all the time.

I've never seen Lynx grumpy for more than a few minutes.

He just couldn't resist happiness.

And life in the forest was a constant lure for him.

Sun, snow, wind, rain,

everything was a cause for excitement.

I never could stay sad very long next to Lynx.

It was almost shameful, how happy it made him to be with me.

Perhaps man's megalomania comes from dogs.

Sometimes I even imagined there must be something special about me

that made Lynx almost keel over with joy at the sight of me.

Of course there was never anything special about me.

Lynx was, like all dogs, simply addicted to people.

You are mine, Lynx.

You're a good doggy.

At times now, when I walk alone in the wintry forest,

I talk to Lynx as I did before.

I have no idea I'm doing it

until something startles me and I fall silent.

I turn my head and catch the gleam of a reddish-brown coat.

But the path is empty: bare bushes and wet stones.

I'm not surprised that I still hear the dry branches

cracking under the light tread of his paws.

Where else would his little dog soul go a-haunting, if not on my trail?

He's a friendly ghost and I'm not afraid of him.

Lynx... beautiful dog, good dog.

My dog,

it's probably my poor head that makes the sound of your footsteps,

the gleam of your coat.

As long as I exist, you'll follow my trail,

hungry and yearning,

as I myself, hungry and yearning, follow invisible trails.

Neither of us will ever bring our prey to the ground.

The first snow fell on the 27th of October.

It took only a few days for winter to set in.

Then came the fohn wind

and licked the young snow from the mountains.

It became disagreeably warm,

and the wind hissed day and night around the lodge.

I slept badly and listened to the baying of stags

down below for the rutting season.

Both cats were drawn outside into the warm, damp forest.

I lay awake and worried about Pearl.

The baying of the stags sounded sad,

threatening and sometimes even desperate.

I only hoped the fohn wouldn't last too long,

and that winter would finally bring us peace.

The fohn only held out for three days,

just long enough to kill Pearl.

Pearl was buried,

and the fohn died down overnight,

as if it had accomplished its task.

I haven't forgotten Pearl.

Her death was the first loss I suffered in the forest.

Once, it must have been in the first winter,

I saw a fox standing drinking at the stream.

I could have shot it;

I had the gun with me, but I didn't do it.

Pearl had to die because one of her ancestors

was an over-bred Angora cat.

She had been predestined to become a victim

Was I to punish the beautiful, vital fox for this?

Pearl had suffered an injustice,

but injustice had also befallen her victims.

Was I to pass it on to the fox?

The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me.

And I alone can show mercy.

Sometimes I wish away the burden of decision-making.

But I am a human,

and I can only think and act like a human.

Only death will free me from that.

When I think of winter, I see the frost-coated fox at the stream.

A lonely, adult animal bound to go its predetermined way.

It seems that this image means something important to me,

as if it were a symbol of something else.

But I can't explain its significance.

Right, my Bella.

Yes, you are so beautiful.

Bella had become more rounded,

but I still couldn't tell if she was expecting.

After all we have been through,

Bella has become more than my cow.

She was a poor, patient sister,

who bore her lot with more dignity than I.

In the night I heard the cold creaking in the wood.

I'd put on a lot of extra logs,

but was shivering under the blanket and couldn't sleep.

Sometimes a log would crackle, then fall silent.

I felt sick.

I knew it was because I had to keep on killing.

I tried to imagine what a person who enjoyed killing might feel.

I could not do so.

The hair stood up on my arms, and my mouth dried out with disgust.

You would probably need to be born to it.

I could bring myself to do it as quickly and skilfully as possible,

but I would never get used to it.

For a long time I lay awake in the crackling darkness,

thinking about the little heart

freezing to a clump of ice in the room above me.

After the great chill, a wave of damp, warmer air set in.

Bella grew nervous, and I had to see to her ten times a day.

On the 11th of January, Bella bled a little.

It was after her evening feed,

and I decided to set myself up in the byre for the night.

Come on, Bella, push!

Push!

Come on, Bella! Come!

So much had happened recently...

Pearl had been killed, a little bull had come into the world,

roe deer had frozen

and the carnivores had had a rich winter.

I myself had a lot of excitement, and now I was tired.

When I closed my eyes I saw snowy mountains on the horizon,

white flakes dropping onto my face in a big, bright silence.

I had no thoughts, no memories;

there was only the big, silent, snowy light.

I knew this feeling could be dangerous for a lonely person,

but I couldn't muster the strength to resist it.

Lynx didn't leave me in peace for long.

He kept coming to me and prodding me with his nose.

Sighing, I got up and set about my daily work.

Now Lynx, my friend and guardian, has ceased to be,

and the desire to go into the white and painless silence

is sometimes very great.

I must take care of myself

and be stricter with myself than I was before.

Lynx was my sixth sense.

Now he's dead I feel like an amputee.

I miss something and will always miss it.

It isn't only that I miss him when I'm hunting and following trails,

and have to spend hours clambering after a deer I've shot.

It isn't that alone.

The worst thing is that without Lynx I feel truly alone.

The question of moving to the Alm occupied me more with every passing day.

The task struck me as terribly arduous,

even if I were to take only necessities with me

and live quite primitively in the pasture.

Once I realised that I'd decided to move long before,

when I'd first seen the green pastures, I grew calmer.

And on the 25th of May

came the day of departure from the lodge.

The path was in good condition,

but it was still four hours before our curious procession

reached the pasture.

It was approaching midday.

I was completely exhausted,

less from physical effort than from nervous tension.

Something new began.

I didn't know what it would bring me.

But my homesickness and anxiety about the future lost ground.

I started to realise that the Alm is beautiful, strange and dangerous.

But like all strange things, it is filled with secret seductions.

It was a strange feeling, to have an overview of a wide area

unhindered by mountains and trees.

And it was not immediately comfortable and liberating.

My eyes had to get used to it,

after a year in the narrow, deep, circular valley.

During my time in the pasture I wrote no diary entries.

I had taken the diary with me and dutifully ticked off each day,

but I didn't even enter important events such as the hay harvest.

The memory of that time has remained fresh, however,

and it isn't hard for me to write about it.

I shall never forget the fragrance of summer,

the rainstorms and the evenings glittering with stars.

For the first time in my life I was calm;

not content or happy, but calm.

It was as if a big hand had stopped the clock in my head.

Sometimes my thoughts grow confused,

and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me,

and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain.

Back then, in the second summer, I hadn't reached that point.

The demarcation lines were still rigidly drawn.

I find it hard when writing to separate my old self from my new self,

and I'm not sure that my new self

isn't being slowly absorbed into some greater "we".

But even then the transformation was coming.

It was the Alm's fault.

It was almost impossible, in the buzzing stillness of the meadow,

beneath the big sky, to remain a single and separate self,

a little, blind, independent life

that didn't want to fit in with a greater being.

My chief source of pride had been that I was such a life,

but in the Alm it suddenly struck me as pathetic and absurd,

an over-inflated nothing.

On the 16th of October, after my return from the pasture,

I began to keep my diary again.

For almost all of October the weather was fine.

I now made the most of the promising climate

and doubled my wood supply.

On All Saints' Day it suddenly grew warm,

and I knew that this could only herald winter.

On the 10th of December, I find a strange entry:

"Time is passing so quickly".

I can't remember having written it.

I don't know what happened on that 10th of December

that led me to write, beneath "New-fallen snow" and "Fetched hay":

"Time is passing so quickly".

Was time passing particularly quickly back then?

I can't remember or give an account of it.

And it isn't true.

It was merely it seemed that way to me.

I think time stands quite still and I move around in it,

sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate.

I do something, things race ahead, and I forget time.

And then, quite suddenly, it surrounds me again.

I shall have to get used to it, its indifference and omnipresence.

Since Lynx died I feel that clearly.

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.

Really, these thoughts are quite meaningless.

I pity animals, and I pity people,

as they're cast into this life without being consulted.

Maybe people are more pitiable,

as they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things.

It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable.

All the same, life could have been lived differently.

There is no impulse more rational than love.

It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one.

We should have recognised 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.

This autumn a white crow appeared.

It flies a little behind the others,

and settles alone on a tree avoided by its companions.

I can't understand why the other Crow's don't like it.

I think it's a particularly beautiful bird.

But its fellows find it repugnant.

A miserable anomaly that shouldn't exist: a white crow.

It sits there until the great flock has flown away,

and then I bring it a little food.

It can't know why it's been ostracised;

that's the only life it knows.

It will always be an outcast, and so alone

that it is less afraid of people than its black brethren.

Every day I wait for the white crow and call to it,

and it looks at me attentively with its reddish eyes.

I can do very little for it.

Perhaps my scraps are prolonging a life that shouldn't be prolonged.

But I want the white crow to live,

and sometimes I dream there's another one in the forest

and that they will find each other.

I don't believe it will happen; I just wish it dearly.

Gradually I began to disengage me from my past

and grow into a new order.

It was May by the time the weather really improved.

Two years had passed in the forest.

The idea that someone might at last find me

hardly crossed my mind any more.

I decided to set off soon for the alpine pasture.

By the beginning of June I'd managed to get used to the Alm,

but it wasn't as it had been the previous year.

That first summer there was gone irrevocably,

and I didn't want a feeble repetition of it,

so I kept myself from succumbing once more to the old magic.

But the pasture didn't make this hard for me;

it had closed itself to me and showed me an unfamiliar face.

That year I again often sat on that bench

looking out over the meadow.

It hadn't changed from before,

and smelt just as sweet,

but I didn't go into the old raptures ever again.

I'd stopped making longer expeditions,

for I'd drawn up my boundaries the previous summer.

I no longer cared where the wall lay.

That summer I quite forgot that Lynx was a dog and I a human.

I knew it, but it had lost any distinctive meaning.

Lynx too had changed.

Now he had so much of my attention, he had grown calmer,

and didn't seem constantly afraid that I might vanish into thin air

as soon as he went off for five minutes.

Thinking about it today,

I believe this was the only big fear in his dog's life:

being abandoned on his own.

I too had learned a lot more,

and understood almost all his movements and noises.

Now, at last, mute comprehension reigned between us.

I carried Lynx to the hut

and laid him on the bench.

He'd suddenly grown small and light.

And then, as if from a great distance, I heard Bella roaring.

She was beside herself with fear.

I tried to calm her down.

Only then did I remember the man.

I knew he must be dead;

he had been such a big target that I couldn't have missed.

I was glad he was dead;

it would have been hard for me to kill an injured person.

Yet I couldn't have left him alive.

Or maybe I could, I don't know.

I didn't want to leave him on the meadow

beside the dead bull, in the virgin grass.

So I picked him up by the legs

and dragged him to the vantage point.

There, where the rocks fall steeply to the scree slope

and alpine roses bloom in June, I let him roll down the hill.

I dug a grave for Lynx in the evening.

I dug the hole deep, laid Lynx into it,

covered it with earth and stamped the grass down over it.

And then I was very tired,

more tired than ever before.

Then I sat down on the bench and waited for the long night.

It was a bright, starlit night,

and the wind blew coldly down from the cliffs.

But I was colder than the wind and didn't feel the chill.

At first light I got up and left the Alm with Bella.

The next day I resumed my usual work.

October came, and I harvested potatoes and fruit.

The straw needed cutting, but that took only a week,

and finally, physically beaten and broken,

I abandoned my senseless flight

and confronted my thoughts.

To no end.

I would like to know why the stranger killed my animals.

I shall never find out, and perhaps it is better that way.

Now I am quite calm.

I can see a short distance ahead.

I can see that this is not yet over.

Everything goes on.

Bullock, Pearl and Lynx will never exist again,

but something new is coming, and I can't escape that.

The memories, the grief and the fear will remain,

as will the hard work, for as long as I live.

Today, the 25th of February,

I am ending my report.

There isn't a single sheet of paper left.

It's now around five o'clock in the evening,

and now so light that I can write without the lamp.

The crows have risen, and circle screeching over the forest.

When they are out of sight

I shall go to the clearing and feed the white crow.

It will already be waiting for me.

FOR E.P.

THE WALL

Subrip by mitbrille Karagarga@2013

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