Authors: Maja Haderlap
Father takes a deep breath to drag his voice up from deep in his belly. He squeezes it into his throat, where it’s honed to a cutting edge. Then he fires sentences from his mouth like blistering projectiles. At some point he breaks off mid-sentence and walks, or rather runs, out of the house. Nothing we can say, no amount of pleading helps. Even Grandmother shrinks back and gets out her rosary. Rivers of darkness flow from the small black opening inside me.
Mother says she can’t stand it any longer, whether she wants to or not she has to go see where Father’s run off to, somebody has to stop him from hurting himself. I grab her hand and try to tell her with the
pressure of my fingers that I want to go with her, that she shouldn’t even try to shake me off. She does try to pull her hand away. Stay here, she says, you have to let go of my hand! There’s no way I’m letting go, and I start to cry. I cry because the dead woman from the pond is stirring inside me. She moans and I scream that we have to do something right away so nothing terrible will happen. Mother is surprised by my determination and lets me go with her.
We run across the courtyard to the barn. Our hearts beat in our throats. We listen intently to hear if anything is moving on the barn floor or in the hay. Our ears are so keen, we would hear even the tiniest mouse scrabbling, but in the barn all is still. Then a shot rings out from the bee-house. The stray shot has hit the mark. It has shredded the breath in my windpipe and the air sacs in my lungs exude a gas that makes me dizzy. I sway and hurry after Mother racing blindly towards the bee-house. Go away, she screams, get away from me. But I’m determined. If it has to be, then I, too, want to look Father’s death in the eye.
We stop at the south side of the small outbuilding and cautiously peer around the corner. Father is lying on his back in the grass below the bee-house, his rifle at a slant beside him as if it had slipped from his hand when he fell. Mother clutches at her heart. She tears herself away from the wall and approaches Father warily. She stops a few steps away and stands looking down at him for a long time, then turns around and walks back to me. He’s breathing, she whispers, he didn’t shoot himself, he’s only playing dead, there’s no sign of blood, no wound. Tell Grandmother she should come down and take Father’s gun away. If I tried to touch it,
he might go after me, you never know, Mother says. Grandmother is already rushing over with a bowl of holy water, which she sprinkles on Father. Holy Mary, Mother of God, what has our family come to, she moans and gropes for the gun.
Father rolls onto his side. He mumbles something I can’t understand.
I turn away from him as I’ll never turn away from him again. I feel he wants to rob me of my childhood. I feel he’s carved a notch in my back, which now hunches slightly, and I’m afraid people will see my back, see how it leaves him behind, even if it’s not far or forever.
I
was planted in my childhood like a wooden stake in a yard that is shaken everyday to see if it can withstand the shaking.
My thoughts are fuzzy. There’s a rushing in my head that spreads through my limbs and floods my ribcage, which I look down at, perplexed.
Old men from the neighborhood pass by with their strange, moist eyes. Their gazes cling to my shoulders, my face. From time to time, Flori grabs my chest to see if anything is happening. He says he wants to marry me when I’m old enough.
Stefan, who has been renting the garret in our outbuilding for the past year, hides something unrestrained behind his reddened face. He drinks and smells of acrid old sweat. He has a habit of talking past people, as if he can’t bring himself to look anyone in the eye, and his words are meant to cheat their way, as if in passing, into the ear canals of those he addresses. He works as a logger for the count and is making himself comfortable in our family. He sits in our kitchen and drips schnapps into
my youngest brother’s tea. I’m embarrassed for him and don’t know if I should tell Mother because she probably wouldn’t believe me. Grandmother can’t stand Stefan, but Father is grateful when Stefan helps him work in the forest or bring in the hay harvest.
I can’t figure out what I’m really living. My feelings aren’t on speaking terms with the words I say. Before, if I aimed my words at objects, emotions, and grasses, I’d hit them, now my words bounce off the objects and emotions. Before, it seemed to me that the feelings took on the words, but now I’m left behind with everything for which there is no language, or if there is, it’s one I can’t use.
Walking defines me. I walk to school. I walk home. I walk across the field and back again. I look up at the treetops and reach for the fruit. I walk to the mountain stream; its splashing fills the valley from the bottom up with invisible bubbles like a tub filled with a foam of noise. My thoughts are spiraling chimaeras, conjectures about Death who’s peeling off his old skin and still isn’t sure when he’ll show himself, when he’ll show everything in its true light. Presumption.
It’s always different with the children in my schoolbooks. There’s never anyone like me. I consider withdrawing from childhood because its roof has grown leaky, because I run the risk of foundering with it. I also think that much more has happened to me than could possibly be good for any child and that I already should have changed into something else, although I have no notion what that might be.
And there are still those words standing around in pretty crinolines, balancing like ballerinas on the tips of their toes, and rumors of being
sent to another school. These thoughts seep into me like a clear carillon, and I imagine how changing schools could cut me off from these surroundings.
Secret thoughts become vain. Timid, burnished thoughts begin circling in my head. They smell of lilies of the valley and look like they’ve just emerged from a beauty bath. They wear princess dresses and fur-lined high-heeled shoes.
After school, I like to go see Aunt Malka who lives with Sveršina in the Auprich cottage. She was one of the girls on our farm, Grandfather’s youngest and prettiest sister, who’d married the widowed Farmer Auprich and, because he died in the war, now lives in the small cottage with Sveršina.
Aunt Malka is the only one who finds everything I say enchanting. She doesn’t just smile at me when I visit her. She beams, she claps her hands, and strokes my cheeks. She gives me a hug. Good Lord, she says, good Lord, my girl, my darling girl, what do you want, what would you like me to give you? She makes me
palatschinken
, pancakes spread with a thick layer of jam. She slips me pieces of candy that glow in my book bag like small spheres of bliss that I keep for myself and don’t share with anyone. She sits with me while I eat and wants to know what’s new at home. Oh, nothing, I say, Grandmother’s doing well. And your father, she asks. He’s doing well, too, I answer. The two of them suffered through so much, she observes, enough for several lives. Does your grandmother tell you how things were then, she wants to know. Yes, sometimes, I say, I know a few stories. You should ask her, Malka urges me. She, too, had
told her children many stories once they started to be curious, how she and the others were arrested as partisans and taken to Ravensbrück, how the war turned their lives upside down. Of course children shouldn’t be frightened too much, it could make them as strange as their parents and grandparents, as crazy as she is. Her fear of planes, for example. Every time she sees a plane in the sky she has to run into the house and hide. She has become so childish with time, she says, terribly childish, as if she’s turned into a girl instead of an old woman. There’s no explanation for it and none for the horrifying dreams she has. Sometimes Malka dreams she’s back in Ravensbrück, and she constantly has to calm Sveršina down. When he can’t sleep, he also talks about Mauthausen, but he doesn’t say much, he’s never very talkative. But your grandmother has kept her pride, she hasn’t become as fearful as I have, she’s not as skittish, Malka tells me.
Sveršina, on the other hand, doesn’t want to hear anything about me when he joins us at the white enamel table. He never asks after my parents or Grandmother. He sits there without saying a word. He seems to know more about them than I do.
F
ATHER avoids us for days after the most recent incident with the gun. He works in the forest and rarely comes home. The mood on our farm is like after a deafening explosion. An inner numbness has us in a stranglehold and makes talking difficult. I wonder if Father’s condition might have something to do with me or with Mother’s attitude. I can’t come up with anything about me that would drive Father to such episodes, so I watch Mother very closely. I’m suddenly suspicious of her loud laughter. I silently reproach her for never joking as boisterously with Father as she does with the acquaintances who come to visit or whom she meets after mass.
But Father is also friendlier outside the house than at home. As long as he’s not drunk, he smiles engagingly. He drapes his arms casually over various seat and chair backs. His tongue loosens and he becomes talkative and says “I” and “I have” and “I”.
I begin to suspect that he’s automatically drawn to those who were hunted by the Nazis and that he thinks there’s something fishy about
people who, as he says, pretend to be better than they are. This doesn’t surprise me. I can’t remember ever finding it surprising. Grandmother also never stops complaining that Mother wants to be something better, that Mother knows nothing about people or the world because she never suffered a day in her life, because she has no idea what suffering is. I debate whether I should take sides in the argument smoldering between Mother and Grandmother and in the end decide to side with Grandmother because she has been through so much in her life and Mother is always finding fault with me.
Father begins to withdraw from social life. When Michi asks him to sing in the Slovenian Cultural Association’s mixed choir, Father declines. They should just leave him in peace with their cultural activities, he says. He never wants to step onstage again, his days of acting and music-making are over. Michi is sorry to hear it and asks if Father would at least consider joining the association’s yearly excursion, it’s always great fun. Yes, Father agrees, for that he’ll go along. He also refuses to go to parent-teacher conferences at school. That’s only for people who think they’re important, he says. He’s never been full of himself, he’s never been one of those people.
Now and then I go collect him from the neighbors’ place, where he’s gotten stuck, as he says, after work in the forest. He likes to sit in the kitchen of the Peršman farm with Anči, who survived back when the SS shot the entire family. She was seven years old, Father says, and she was hit six times. You can still see the bullet wounds on her chin and hand.
She was able to play dead, but the younger children cried and were shot and killed.
When I arrive, Father is usually sitting at the end of the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in his hand. Anči presides near the stove on which she keeps her children’s dinner warm. As soon as I enter the kitchen, I start to examine her face and hands for scars. She was able to hide behind the stove, Anči says, but her little brother, who was in her arms, was shot.
On the front of the house is a marble plaque with the names of the children, the parents, and grandparents, engraved and gold-plated. Father says he could never live in a house where he’d be reminded of the dead every day, several times a day, every time he went in or out.
W
HEN I come home from school one day, Grandmother tells me that old Pečnica is dead and that she wants me to go with her to the wake.
As darkness falls, we cross the field behind our house and walk through the woods up to the Pečniks’. People stand by the front door, talking in hushed voices. Grandmother and I enter the room where old Pečnica is laid out. Neighbors sit and pray on the wooden benches that line the walls. The coffin is set before an open window and is surrounded with wreathes and flower arrangements of glowing red and white blossoms.
Grandmother cuts a small chunk of bread from the loaf handed to her. She gives me a bite and says that with this bread, she’s cut off a bit of eternity, that by this bread we’ll recognize each other in the hereafter, by the bread we eat at wakes. I’m not sure I want to eat this bread because the thought of meeting the dead in the hereafter scares me. I quickly slip the bread out of my mouth and hide it in my coat pocket. On a small table at the foot of the bier are two white candles, a statue of the Virgin
Mary, a framed photograph, and two teacups with holy water to sprinkle on the dead woman. Only now do I notice that the coffin is encircled with intertwined red carnations that look like they’re growing out of the corpse. Grandmother tells me to take the small twig of boxwood from the teacup and sprinkle the dead woman with holy water. The only part of her I recognize are her strong hands, folded on her stomach. At the head of the bier, Grandmother lifts me slightly so that I can see the woman’s face. I see an unfamiliar, round, waxy face, bordered by a dark kerchief and I quickly make a few motions in the shape of a cross with the boxwood twig. Done, I say to Grandmother, who is groaning under my weight. She lowers me to the flowers, lays her hand on the dead woman’s forearm, and makes the sign of the cross with her fingertips. After we’ve sat down on a bench set close to the bier, I notice that Michi is also sitting on the bench, crying. I ask Grandmother if Michi is related to the dead woman and she says no, but Pečnica was very good to the neighbor’s children.
On the way home, Grandmother tells me that on Christmas in ’44, Pečnica took in Michi and his sisters, Zofka and Bredica, after the police had surrounded the Kuchars’ house and had shot at Michi’s mother and the partisans who were staying there. Luckily, Michi held his mother back so she couldn’t run out of the house. She would have been immediately mowed down by the patrol like Primož who ran out ahead of her. The seven-year-old Michi, his entire body trembling, stepped out in front of the house with the two Knolič sisters, Anni and Malka, who were also partisans. The Knolič sisters were arrested at once and taken to
Ravensbrück. Michi had to step over Primož’s body and saw the police beat two more partisans who had surrendered with their butts of their guns. One of the wounded partisans was her own brother Cyril, whom I must know, Grandmother tells me. The children went to the Pečniks with just a few possessions. Pečnica warmed them up and took care of them until they’d calmed down enough to go stay with relatives over in Lobnik two weeks later.