Authors: Maja Haderlap
In the intervals between prayers, I serve tea and pastries.
Later, after most of the mourners have left, a few of the more persistent take a seat in the kitchen. They drink coffee and prepare to keep vigil through the night.
I go to the outbuilding, lie down in Grandmother’s bed and, feeling comforted, fall asleep immediately. Past midnight, I wake with a start. It suddenly occurs to me that I’m sleeping in a deathbed. The initial sense of familiarity evaporates at once. I consider jumping out of bed because
I sense I won’t be able to cope with the waves of anxiety breaking over me. Premonitions of death wash over me, stiffness, numbness, carrion, the verb “to pass,” the raging sea with the ship of death, the black sail over the dead water, the quicklime, too much to bear. Through the window, I can see the brightly lit kitchen in the main house and the living room illuminated with the glow of the candles. I put on my clothes and step outside. The night is clear, the clouds swept from the sky with its bright, twinkling stars. Three men stand below the house with their backs to me, peeing. They’re talking and do not hear me coming. As I get closer, I recognize Father with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Stanko is telling them that whenever he sees a cigarette glimmer in the dark, a firefly flutter past, or even someone strike a match, it’s always a shock for him, because it reminds him of the partisans who smoked in the dark. Suddenly, in the night, the partisans would be standing behind his parents’ house or behind his back. To him, those faint gleams were signs that things could get serious again, that they would have to see to the wounded or offer provisions.
Yes, well, Father says and spits, are you coming back inside with us?
No, Stanko answers. He wants to go home and marvel at the peaceful night. He says goodnight, not before adding that I am probably also one of those who startles people.
Father brings cider up from the cellar and goes into the kitchen with Sveršina and me. I can’t sleep in Grandmother’s bed, I say to explain why I’m awake. The mood in the kitchen has lifted. Cyril sits at the table with Leni, rubbing his hands, because he won at cards. A loud snoring
comes from my room over the kitchen. That’s my wife, Cyril says, she’s asleep in your bed. At home she snores so loud you can hear her out on the street. Sveršina slides in behind the table and says, since Zdravko isn’t allowed to play cards he’d like to take the opportunity to ask Leni how it was when she took over the farm. I can tell you about that, too, Father says. What is it you want to tell, Leni interrupts Father, you were such a mess when we told you your mother had been arrested that you threw yourself on the ground in front of my house and started eating the grass. Do you remember? Leni asks. Father answers no. There you go! A week after they tortured you, your mother was arrested. It was too much for you. I can still see you as a ten-year-old boy, Leni says, I know how you were doubled up with cramps.
I am suddenly wide-awake. What happened? I ask. Well, they hanged him, Leni says. Who, I want to know. Your father, she says. How come? I ask because nothing else occurs to me. Tell her about it, Leni says to Father, for whom the conversation is now uncomfortable. He scratches his head and says, they just wanted to know if Grandfather had joined the partisans and if he came home now and then, that’s all. What do you mean, that’s all? I ask. The police came from Eisenkappel to our farm, very early, I took care of the cows before going to school, they gathered around me in a circle, down there, by the mill. They asked about Grandfather and if I knew when he was coming home, Father recounts looking around at us to see if we even want to hear his story. He sees my astonished expression and continues. After I protested several times
that I didn’t know anything, the police officers took ropes out of their knapsacks and tied one around my neck. Then they hanged me from a branch, a branch on the walnut tree that stood next to the mill. They pulled me up with the rope until I started to faint and then let me down again. Then they pulled me back up, three times in a row. Then Grandmother ran out of the house and begged them to let me go, she begged them to let me go for God’s sake because I still had to go to school. Ain’t gonna make it to school, the police said and went up to the house and turned everything upside down. After that, they took him to the Čemers’ farm, Father recalls, they’d just arrested Johi Čemer and beat him so badly that Father couldn’t bear to look at him. One police officer spoke to him in Slovenian and told him that he would beat the two of them even worse if they didn’t tell the truth, they should just finally tell the truth. All day long, they dragged him and Johi to one bunker after another that had been betrayed to them, but they didn’t find any partisans. At two in the morning, they brought him to the police station in Eisenkappel and let him sleep on the bare ground. They threw me a blanket, but that was it, Father says. In the morning they took me to another room and hung me up on a hook in the wall, a kind of clothes hook. Then a police officer beat me with a whip, Mother of God, Father says, beating a child with a whip. It was a thick whip with lots of cords. As the officer was beating him, he kept asking if Grandfather was at home. But I didn’t say a thing, Father announced. So they let him go. The police officer told him Mici had to report to the station. Then I ran like the devil. Mother met me on the way home. I was beaten black and blue, all over my face
and my legs. I was terrified, Father says looking a little surprised that he spoke so long.
After you got home you were so scared you couldn’t open your mouth, Leni says. Your neck was full of bruises and your legs covered with blue welts but you absolutely refused to say a thing. Yes, that’s how it was, Father says and falls silent.
I am completely upset and want to leap up and ask questions I can’t put into words. They rebound through me like a loose flock of arrows, speeding about in all directions and ricocheting off each other. I try to look over at Father who is sitting next to me, but I cannot move my head. I’m afraid to look him in the eye now, it would be an offense against something. His story has become mine, I observe, although in the moment I’m not perceiving anything, I merely have the feeling that he told me a part of my own story. I recoil from this thought just as I shrink away from Father’s story, which I find horrifying and incomprehensible. I turn that incomprehensibility onto my own story and am incensed at having to think such thoughts. I don’t want to have to think about it.
Leni recounts that, when she saw Grandmother being arrested, she scooped up little Bredica and ran to our farm. It looked as if everything in the house was topsy-turvy and, you wouldn’t believe it, a neighbor was already in the cellar trying to fill a sack with apples, Leni says. That’s why she decided then and there to stay at the farm; they’d have carried off the entire house and cleaned out the stable. In early November, three weeks after Grandmother’s arrest, Grandfather came, accompanied by another
partisan, close to the farm and called her up into the forest. That’s the first time I saw my brother as a partisan, Leni says. Grandfather was so frantic about his wife’s arrest that Leni had to reassure him. She promised she would stay on the farm until the end of the war and would take care of his children. Then she collected some sugar, salt, and dried fruit and carried it into the forest. A few days later all hell broke loose. I still wonder who it was who reported that I took a basket of provisions into the forest, Leni says. From then on, the children had to stand guard when a partisan came to the house. In late December, there was a lot of snow on the ground, my brother came back and suddenly appeared in the hut where we prepared the slop for the pigs and where I brewed schnapps with the children. He had come alone via Globasnitz, there had been a gunfight, during which his group had been torn apart and they’d had to flee. One of his friends had been killed. My brother said that it was all pointless, that he was going to turn himself in to the police, that he was bringing trouble on his whole family, that he couldn’t stand this kind of life any more. He cried like a baby, my brother cried like a baby, Leni says. She made him some scrambled eggs and a cup of tea. She gave him clean underwear and dried his clothes. She and Tonči, his eldest son, convinced him not to rush into anything, the Gestapo would send him straight to the camp or would have him tortured, it made no sense to turn himself in, and it wouldn’t bring his wife and foster daughter home. At that, your Grandfather calmed down a bit. Before it got light, he darted back into the forest, Leni says. What times those were!
It was a dog’s life, Cyril says. As a soldier, he’d gotten used to quite a bit, but the uncertainty, the lack of supplies, the cold, and how they always
had to be on their guard … Being with the partisans, he lost his sense of humor even though he sometimes had an itch to pull some shenanigans, but that always risked putting someone in danger. Šorli the courier, for example, just could not give up playing his accordion and running after women. He was snagged by a patrol and fatally wounded at the Wögel’s farm when he tried to jump out of the sitting room window and his accordion got caught on the window frame. He gave up his life for a few happy hours, I suppose. That’s how crazy people were sometimes, Cyril says. He himself couldn’t give up hunting, he just had the itch. He got his hunting rifle from home and then it happened. When he jumped over the damn fence, a shot went off and right through his hand. Jesus Christ, Cyril says. So I had to be treated illegally by the doctor, whereas until then I was the one taking care of the sick and wounded in the bunkers. They had to build a bunker near his farm so his wife could take care of him in secret. His sister had to get bandages and medicine from the community physician who sympathized with the Germans. Naturally, the doctor could guess who the medicine was for, but he just gave it to her and grumbled, as he had on other occasions as well, and didn’t blow anyone’s cover. After my hand had healed, I was assigned to be an escort to the commanders. I knew all the paths and tracks, the neighbors trusted me, Cyril says. The wound was good for something, he had thought to himself, maybe it was meant to happen. After he decided to desert from the Wehrmacht in Finland where he had been deployed with an anti-aircraft battery, he had an old Carinthian doctor in Klagenfurt bandage his arm when he was on leave so he could return home. The doctor looked up at me and asked if he could bandage up my good arm, Cyril
says, he didn’t say any more than that. Surely he knew I was planning on deserting.
To a certain extent, people were completely naïve, Sveršina joins into the conversation. That lasted until they realized that in our valleys, it was a life and death struggle. For a while, the farmers and the farmhands believed the partisans were adventurers they could badmouth. No one had a clue about conspirators. Sveršina says he’d often racked his brains about why so many people from our valleys ended up in concentration camps and why the police were always so well-informed.
Dear Cyril, Leni says, in all the time since that disastrous winter when you and I were arrested as partisans, I don’t think we once sat down together as long as this. She stands up. You were a brave fighter, aside from that accident with the hunting rifle. You even grabbed the grenade the police had thrown into my house and threw it right back outside. You saved the lives of my children and everyone living in my house at the time we were betrayed. Even if you just stick to your woodcarving now and don’t have any time for us politicals, you contributed a great deal to the liberation of our land.
It was horrible, Cyril interrupts her, the way they mowed down Primož and tortured you in prison.
I’m not finished, Leni says and takes a deep breath. She believes that today’s wake is a special one, which Mitzi, her sister-in-law, now laid out, could well have been listening to. She was proud that the Slovenian people did not back down during the Nazi years, that they started to fight for their survival. On certain days she can feel the scars on her neck, back, and bottom left from the Gestapo interrogation. It’s the past knocking
on my door, Leni says, it calls out to me and starts tormenting me. That’s when she’s sure that they, the older generations, have the obligation to pass on what they know to the younger ones, so that they don’t end up one day with no memories of their families. She’d like to close, she tells us, by saying that she’s very happy that Zdravko went the whole evening without raising his voice once and remained calm. As everyone smiles with embarrassment, Father’s face freezes. He asks me if I’d like to keep vigil now since he has to lie down. I agree because I hope it will help quiet my mind.
Leni goes with me to the casket in the living room and with a cloth dries the holy water from Grandmother’s face, which has gotten wet from the many blessings. She changes the candles and backs out of the room, as if she wanted to pay homage to Grandmother one more time.
I remain alone with the casket and watch the candles’ flickering tongues. A few drops of holy water that landed on Grandmother’s jacket look like little soap bubbles. I can hear the sound of creaking chairs in the kitchen. I open the window and sit back down on the bench near the oven. My thoughts begin to sink into my belly, where they look for a dark place to settle.
Silence emanates from the bier. Outside I can hear the first birdcalls, they float into the room as a warbling, chirping wave of sound. The birdsong flows around the silent core of the bier and envelops Grandmother in something in which she can return, something that will take her back.
Cyril comes from the kitchen and says that Sveršina has fallen asleep on the bench. Cyril wants to say more prayers for his sister. He sits at the head of the bier and takes a rosary from his pocket. In silent prayer, his fingers unroll the rosary, bead by bead, sentence by sentence. I stretch out on the bench and fall asleep.
Mother, who has gotten up to go to the stables, wakes me. She says I can lie down in her bed. I see Cyril still sitting at the head of the bier and stumble, drunk with sleep, into my parents’ bedroom. When I get up, it’s midday. Those who kept vigil all night have left.