Authors: Maja Haderlap
After Pečnica’s burial, for which Father and Mother drove to Eisenkappel, I overhear a heated conversation between Father and Grandmother in the sitting room.
He knows exactly, Father claims, Beti told him, or maybe it was old Pečnik, back then in January ’44, the two of them had gone to Hojnik’s to see what happened after the police had killed old Hojnik, who was in bed with pneumonia, and had shot the farmer’s family. They’d heard the shots from the Pečniks’ place and could see something was burning. The dead bodies had been thrown, half-burnt, onto the manure pile. After old Pečnik went to Eisenkappel to report the incident, the police came back at night, poured gasoline on the rest of the Hojniks, and set them on fire. Nonsense, Grandmother counters, old Hojnik wasn’t ill, his son Johan was in bed with pneumonia when the police looted their house. Old Hojnik was beside himself because the police not only wanted to arrest his sick son, but also to take away his daughter-in-law Angela and his grandchildren, Mitzi and Johan. The police had filled two ox-drawn carts with stolen goods and blankets and ordered old Hojnik to come
with them, but with his crutches he could barely walk in the snow. He sat down on the side of the road and said he wouldn’t let them take him away from his farm. So then, the police officers beat him to death with his crutches. Bits of his brain stuck to the surrounding trees, that’s what eighteen-year-old Mitzi told her in Ravensbruck, where she’d been sent after the arrest, Grandmother says. Mitzi and her brother Johan, who had to pull a fully loaded cart, were forced to watch as their parents and grandparents were murdered. Mitzi Hojnik, by the way, was killed on the very day Ravensbrück was evacuated. An SS man was shooting wildly about because he was drunk and Mitzi happened to step out of the line at that very moment. On evacuation day, you understand, just like that, by chance, Grandmother says, her voice rising. She was denied a homecoming. In any case, Grandmother continues after a pause, little Klari, whom the police left behind with her younger siblings, all of them alone on the farm, she refused to leave the house for three days. Pečnica took in the terrorized children who had barricaded themselves in the house, paralyzed with fear. She went and got Klari, ten-year-old Roki, three-year-old Rozika, and thirteen-month-old Mihec and brought them home to the Pečniks.
Hojnik above Pečnik, Kuchar below Pečnik, the farms one on top of the other and our farm nearby. I stand near the door left ajar and listen.
As I listen, something collapses in my chest, as if a stack of logs were rolling away behind me, into the time before my time, and that time reaches out to grab me and I start to give in out of fascination and fear. It’s got hold of me, I think, now it’s here with me.
The child understands that it’s the past she must reckon with. She can’t just focus on her own wishes and on the present. The sprawling present that allows the grownups to survey the past as from a distant shore, the same past that blocked their view of everything then. Childhood is naturally oriented towards the future, but against the backdrop of the past, the future proves lightweight. What could it possibly bring, where will it lead? Isn’t it enough, when it simply makes life possible, thinks Father, and the child occasionally thinks so, too.
In the books I read, bodies remain intact and rise up to heaven with a blissful expression or are caught as they fall. In our graves, however, it suddenly occurs to me, bodies are always ravaged, destroyed as a warning to those who remain. Here the rashest dissipation holds sway, here life is squandered, here bodies are brought low, it’s a crying shame. One day when I enter our neighbors’ kitchen, Loni pushes me emphatically back out. Help, she screams, help, we need a doctor right away! I see her brother Andi lying on the kitchen bench, groaning. He is as white as a sheet. A kitchen knife is sticking out of his stomach. Andi’s mother screams, don’t pull it out, don’t pull it out, get a doctor, now! When I have just taken my younger twin sisters to Rastočnik for ice cream, Rosi and Filica speed past on a moped and crash in the curve behind the barn. Rosi runs towards me, blood streaming down her face, screaming for help, while her sister lies dying on the side of the road, her neck broken. The echoes of the family’s weeping have barely faded in my mind when Stefan hangs himself, our boarder Stefan, who for weeks has
been leaving smudges and drops of blood on all the chairs and benches he sat on. He hangs himself near the door to the stable, under the ramp that leads up to the threshing floor, as if he wanted to dangle right in front of my mother’s eyes, since she is usually the first one in the stalls in the morning. She had a nervous breakdown, Grandmother says as we stand around the kitchen in shock from the news. First, she needs to calm down, and we children must stay in the house until they’ve taken the corpse away. But without waiting for the hearse, we drag the hanged man into the house with our watchful eyes, we pull him out from under the wooden bridge that hides him, we picture to ourselves what he must have looked like, we imagine we’re kneeling on the bridge, peering down between the planks and catching sight of his swaying legs, his dangling, lifeless legs in blue work pants. By the time the doctor arrives, we have already looked down from the bridge several times in our imagination. The way you look from shore into raging water, from life we look at eager Death. Death disguised himself in work clothes. He wanted to remain unrecognized under the barn if possible, pushing the corpse before him without being seen. But we recognized him and felt a hint of his presence.
Mother cries for days, never again will she be able to go into the stables without fear, she complains, Stefan hanged himself under the barn to punish her, he could have hanged himself somewhere else, somewhere she wouldn’t have been the one to find him. Grandmother says it serves her right.
Before long our farm is too small and too loud for Death. He finds refuge at the Auprichs’ farm, where he takes cover and is not noticed for a time until the farmer, a friend of my father’s, startles him and shoots himself a few months later. The morning we were told that Franz shot himself in the head with a rifle, but his aim was bad and all he did was shoot out his own eyes, I feel things getting tight, I feel that Death hasn’t given up his attack on Father, but has only taken a detour so he can get closer and ambush him. Father says, now he’s done it, he’s really gone and done it. I think his thought through to the end, which immediately gets me worked up. I think I understand how serious things have gotten and that I have to fulfill my duty. It’s now up to me to save Father.
After Franz’s burial, I watch Father with suspense. I know that work protects him during the week, but his unease is palpable on weekends. It’s as if he were constantly observing his life and had no idea what he should feel about it. On Sundays, bare-chested, he shaves in the kitchen and washes his underarms with the water brimming with stubble and bits of foam. He combs his hair with an old comb dipped in after-shave. He smells of soap and sometimes, when he catches me looking at him, a smile lights up his eyes like a gentle taunt, like a nod to better times which he has also had, though there is no point in thinking of them now.
Would I like to know what he’d been thinking at Franz’s burial? I nod. He was thinking that it’s only at a funeral that people realize whom they’ve just lost. Only then do they understand what the person they’re carrying
to the grave meant to them, what his true worth as a human being was. When it’s time to say goodbye, people are overcome with emotion, they weep and grieve, but at that point it’s too late, because it makes no difference to the dead whether or not they’re being buried with honor, do I understand? I nod again. A person is honored for the first time, everyone throws flowers on his coffin, they make speeches in which the community thanks him for his work, for the sacrifices the dead man made in his life, but it’s all pointless. At his own funeral, Father tells me, he’s going to make sure he spoils some people’s joy in weeping and wailing, they’ll be stunned, they will realize for the first time that they did him wrong and for the rest of their lives, they won’t forgive themselves for treating him like a mangy dog. He will reject their tears, he won’t relent, no matter how much they whine and plead for his forgiveness, that much he has promised himself, Father says.
I picture a procession of people following Father’s coffin, the mourners beating their hands against their chests with remorse and gathering around the open grave, their heads hanging low. I agree with Father and have to work hard to keep from giving way to tears because I think I can also make out a tone of mockery and rancor in his words.
My uneasiness grows when Father goes to the tavern on Sunday afternoons. As soon as evening has fallen and I can hear him swearing behind the stable on his return, I sit by the living room window, from which I can see the stable and, more importantly, the ramp to the threshing barn. Mother asks me to watch how long Father stays in the barn. If he isn’t back in half an hour, someone will have to go check on him. With its
beams and rafters, the threshing barn is a place that gives people ideas, Mother says.
I’m sure I once heard Father threaten Mother that he would hang himself in the barn after she took away the cartridges for his rifle. As a hunter, he has a right to his cartridges, and it’s downright indecent for her to have taken them. There isn’t a single woman in Lepena who would dare take away her husband’s bullets.
As soon as Father has staggered up the wooden ramp to the threshing barn, racing thoughts set my body on fire, the fever spikes, and I start to melt like beeswax put too near the flame. Father usually comes down again, but a few times we wait for him in vain. We hurry into the barn with bated breath and find him asleep in the hay.
One Monday morning, as I am checking my schoolbag before going to school, Father comes into the sitting room and sits on the bench near the oven. In his hand, he is holding a calving rope and he sighs. This time I don’t hold back my tears and I sit down next to him. He looks at me, astonished as if he only just grasped what I thought I’d understood. But my girl, he says, you don’t need to cry! I only thought about doing it, and when I wanted to do it, when I put the noose around my neck, I could feel something holding me back, a kind of angel, you see. I thought I saw someone. I can’t do it, that’s one thing you need to know! I can’t bring myself to do it, Father says.
Mother is suddenly standing before us and she starts screaming at Father, does he realize what he’s doing to the child, does he have any idea
that I immediately get a fever when he gets up to his stupid tricks, he should just stop terrorizing the children, she screams, he should finally get a grip on himself! Well, the girl, at least, loves me, which no one can say about you, Father taunts Mother. Besides, he’s planning on moving in with his brother.
At that moment, the despair bottled up inside me comes flooding out. I wail and beg him not to go, he has to stay with us. I cling to him tightly, I will hold on until he finally understands that he can’t sneak out of our lives.
She’s about to faint, Mother says, I’ve never seen her like this, the child is out of her senses, she tells him I have to be put to bed, I can’t go to school in such a state. Now Father can see what he’s done, he’s scared the child out of her wits.
They carry me to bed, and I toss and turn under the sheets. Mother holds my hand, she sits at my bedside as she has never done before. She brings me warm milk and apple compote, she’ll even bring me red currants from the cellar storeroom if I’d like. I have to calm down, she says. She tells me I should pray, if I prayed properly, God would put everything right, she believes. I don’t.
For the next week, Father can hardly sleep. Through the long nights he sways his upper body and aching head back and forth. He moans and groans, his headache is like a purgatorial fire, he has no idea how he could have earned such pain, he can’t imagine why God would punish him with a headache like this.
One evening, Grandmother has him stand in the doorway to the house and toss cooled embers over his head behind him, one piece of coal for each stab of pain.
Throw your pain behind you, without looking back, hold your breath, say a prayer! You have to believe, Grandmother says. You have to call the saints because to hear is to obey. Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Souriel, Zaziel, Badakiel! Flee illness, a god is chasing you out! Flee illness, a god is chasing you out!
O
UT of exhaustion, I begin to withdraw from my sentient body. I wonder why no one has thought of casting a protective spell for me, too, a spell that would shield me from excessive danger. I wonder why they all forget to cover me with defensive words that will preserve me from this reality that makes me shudder at every new occurrence. I could grab any hand, could press myself against any tree or animal I pass. I speak with the calves and let loose on the imperturbable cows when I drive them off the field and into the barn.
Grandmother keeps making signs to come near her, she wants to tell me something. She asks me if I’d like to sleep in the outbuilding with her, I could share her bed. I do want to! But only if your mother doesn’t object, Grandmother says with a slight, triumphant trembling in her voice, you have to ask her first, of course.
Sometimes I ask Mother before even speaking to Grandmother. I just invite myself to Grandmother’s room. I don’t want to be alone.
Grandmother’s bedroom is a site of memory, a queen bee’s cell, in which everything seems bathed in a milky liquid, a breeding cell, in which I’m fed with Grandmother’s nutrient juices. It is in this nucleus, I realize only years later, that I will be formed. Grandmother guides my sense of orientation. From then on there will be no passing by her markers. My senses will project Grandmother’s vibrations onto this world and will perceive the possibility of destruction everywhere. They will wait for fateful coincidences, for moments in which change is possible, because one must hope and prepare for salvation, yet without good fortune, everything falls apart.
From the moment Grandmother decides to bring me into the two years of her life that marked her most profoundly, the pamphlets she brought back from the commemoration ceremony in Ravensbrück,
The Women of Ravensbrück
and
What does it have to do with me?
, lie on her night table next to the arnica tincture and the bitter mugwort liqueur. Occasionally Grandmother hands me a pamphlet and asks me to read out loud to her from it. I sit down at the old kitchen table and read: In Ravensbrück there were the
Lagerkommandanten
(camp commanders), the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
(preventive detention camp leader), the
Verwaltungsführer
(head of administration), the
Arbeitsdienstführer
(head of work details), the Gestapo officers in the political department, the camp doctors, the SS nurses, the
Oberaufseherin
(senior camp guard), the
Aufseherinnen
(camp guards), the SS
Wachmannschaften
(security guard details).