Authors: Maja Haderlap
In the evening, the mourners bring more bouquets and wreaths to the house. The sweetish smell of flowers spreads through the living room and turns, by the next morning, into the sharper smell of wilting flowers. After midnight, as the last mourners leave, Father decides to put the coffin lid on because, as he says, she has started to work. The window is opened, and the room is fumigated. Before the coffin lid is brought into the room, Mother approaches the bier and grabs jerkily at Grandmother’s hand. She starts to whimper softly and then says in a voice loud enough for me to hear: When you were alive, you were not good to me, but I always respected you. May God grant you peace. I’ve made my peace with you. Mother’s outburst, which rises to loud sobbing and subsides, disconcerts me. When the men lay the lid on the coffin, Mother tears herself away from the bier. She blows her nose in her handkerchief and begins to pray in a hoarse voice. We are forced to answer her and stand perplexed in the room, which suddenly resembles a bird’s nest on
a high cliff, from the opening of which the dead are thrown down into the depths.
Tschik will take over the final vigil, so that he can take his leave from his KZ companion, as he puts it. The wreath from the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Association with the red triangle in its center rests against the front of the bier and gleams.
The pallbearers come to the farm early the next morning. The dead woman in her coffin is lifted out through the window and set down on the doorstep one last time so that she can say goodbye to her home and those she leaves behind. Then the coffin is set on a trailer, covered with wreaths, and driven to the graveyard.
Grandmother’s burial is a solemn one. I move through the throng of people as if I were using my body for the first time. As the coffin is carried through the market square, a pair of warbling thrushes frolic above the funeral procession and the massive wreaths.
After Grandmother is laid to rest, I am also offered condolences, which surprises me since I had not considered myself an adult. At the funeral dinner, I look at Father, and he strikes me as a man who has just lost his entire family.
At home I sit in the empty living room that still has faint traces of the sweetish smell of decay. Along with the smell fading from the room, I can feel Grandmother retreating from me. She shifts inside me, as if it were time to part. She stands up, lays her knitting on the table, draws the curtains, closes the door, and walks out from inside me. A tenacious pain
settles into the space in me she once filled, a pain that will not yield for a long time. My eyes linger on the primroses outside along the near edge of the field that stretches up the slope behind our house. Everything is about to change, I think.
On the following day, after helping Mother clean the house and scrub the living room floor, I crouch in a warm hollow behind our house near the forest’s edge. I look down into the valley and wonder if I shouldn’t start writing after all. I could divert words from their constant rotation around me, I could pull them out of their dark course and have them tell my own story, but a story of my own is nothing more than a Fata Morgana.
A
FTER Grandmother’s death, the order of things in our house is reconfigured. Her legacy is distributed. I get her straw hats and kerchiefs, her white linen petticoats, a couple of teacups and glasses, as well as a few photographs. These objects are my body’s fitments, I find, they give me shape for the first time.
Mother arranges the household according to her own ideas. She buys herself a moped and, when necessary, drives it to the remote regional capital to take care of official matters or to make purchases. She loads her purchases into a large knapsack she carries on her back or into the bags she fastens onto the luggage rack. Little by little, she takes over the organization of the family. Father complains that she is rising above him, but leaves the official and domestic decisions entirely to his wife.
He begins leading a double life, one life for the neighbors and another for his family. He tries to maintain the illusion for his neighbors that he leads a light-hearted existence. In public, he wants to display his
cheerfulness, his confidence, and his diligence. He wants to be considered the hardest worker, the most accomplished and circumspect hunter in the area. He wants to be a daring motorcyclist and the jolliest clarinet and accordion player around. He wants the neighbors to remember him for his extraordinary practical jokes and feats. In winter, even though he does not know how to ski, he lets himself be talked into strapping on skis and barreling down the steep escarpment for others’ amusement. He enters sled races with a heavy old farm sleigh so he can play the clown, swallows raw eggs until he feels nauseous, climbs onto every overloaded cart and up every tree if asked. He drinks to excess because he doesn’t believe in moderation, because as long as he can remember, his life has been filled with extremity, enormity, and transgression. At home, the slightest thing can unsettle, irritate, or exasperate him. He loses patience easily. When he doesn’t understand something or someone contradicts him, he refuses to speak for days at a time.
After Grandmother’s death, Father stops talking about suicide. The destructive rage he used to direct inward, he now turns outward. When he’s drunk, his body becomes an instrument that emits shrill, ear-splitting shrieks. His voice is catapulted out of his wiry ribcage in every possible pitch and at every imaginable level of intensity. His rages are like the howling of a man condemned to death. In this state, he runs from room to room or entrenches himself behind the kitchen table, which he hammers with his fists. He threatens to show us just how much he’s worth, he will show us children and Mother, we who want only to destroy him. He vents his fears and anxieties, launches his rage against us in a
barrage of words that buries us and from which we will arduously have to dig ourselves out hours later.
Father’s thoughts revolve around death. He is susceptible to destructive tendencies. When he comes home spent or from the Rastočniks’, he begins to fantasize about murders that were committed in the region before, during, and after the War. He shouts that he knows who killed that nymphomaniac Katharina, who was discovered stabbed to death in the Lepena stream before the war, he knows who killed Peternel when he came home after the war, he knows who did away with the partisans in Benetek Valley, he shouts that he feels he’s under threat, he, too, will be murdered one day, murdered by his wife who already has it all planned out and set up, she’s got the pickaxe and spade ready so she can hide his body after she has killed him. He is utterly convinced that Mother is responsible for all his bad feelings. He accuses her of humiliating him as a man, of betraying him, and always saying the wrong thing. She doesn’t understand him and is ruining his reputation with her ways, she has no pity for him. He claims she, the daughter of a simple day laborer, is not grateful enough for the social status she now enjoys from having married into a farming family.
Mother is far from feeling any compassion for Father. She gives him sullen and reproachful looks because she feels misunderstood and insulted. She makes it clear that he has disappointed her, that she dreams of leading another life, and that she believes marrying him was a mistake.
Father’s fits of nerves over the years infuse us children like an invisible poison, drop by drop. We watch how he undermines his role as father, how he tries to turn us into sidekicks who have to put up with his raging fury, how he draws us into his old horror and tries to impress his pain on us, pain we can intuit but not grasp, how he wants us to undo his devastation with ours, and wants us to understand that horror is the essence of life. He feels betrayed by everyone around him and betrays us to all those who are ready to credit his suspicions. After the storm dies out and life continues soberly, Father remains silent for days from horror and regret, from the shame or satisfaction of having once again expressed himself fully.
I can only recover with difficulty from the havoc wreaked on me by staying up all night with Father, nights in which none of us can sleep because he will not calm down. I’m worn out from his fits and cannot find the words to describe the impact of his outbursts. My attempts to speak are no more than meek stammering and silence because I’m embarrassed by my incomprehension and am ashamed for Father.
In spite of it all, I come to his defense, as all his relatives instinctively do. They seem to have come to an agreement that his outbursts must be respected, that there is no point in asking anyone for advice since, in any case, you can never be sure of being understood or receiving assistance. The reigning attitude is that you cannot escape fate. You have to accept your destiny like the old family names because those who do try to flee vanish in the distance, disappear like smoke.
I write my first poems, mere groping for words, and live through the period before my final examination in the student dormitory as in a no-man’s land, where I have been granted an interval I can fill with daydreams and nocturnal fantasies. I hope I will be able to find or invent the right language, and I conceive phantom sentences that I launch into the future. All that is thought and felt, experienced and feared, will only come to words later, they will meet or be joined in a phrase, I hope, some day, when the time comes.
I
N CONTRAST to the combative Leni, who was politicized by the war, Father is suspicious of politics and refuses to take part in the demonstrations that follow the anti-Slovenian
Ortstafelsturm
or “place-name sign storm” when bilingual road signs were destroyed throughout the province by German-national Carinthians, because he believes you should let sleeping dogs lie. He and his companions from the war years did not want anyone swearing or spitting at them on the street. Even Michi is convinced, after a rally of Slovenian Carinthians in Klagenfurt, that for decades to come, the German Carinthians in Klagenfurt would resent the Slovenians, the children of the farmers, laborers, and clerical workers from the southern part of the province for publicly protesting and demanding compliance with the Austrian State Treaty, especially for demanding that Article 7 of the treaty be followed, in other words, demonstrating for something that means absolutely nothing to the majority of the population. The majority, on the other hand, feel that the national treaty is more a castigation than a state contract, a punishment meted out to them after the war on terms dictated by the occupying powers.
Father has lost the conviction that getting involved politically is worthwhile, or maybe he never had it. The idea you can change anything is foreign to him. Father believes that engaging in politics is to put your life at risk. He believes absolutely everything is at stake, not just individual interests. He cannot separate his own interests from his survival. He is skeptical of anyone who acts under the protection of a political organization or looks for support in an ideological creed. He can’t recall a single political slogan he could believe. The only thing he has to say about his time with the partisans is that, as a child, he was never assigned to a combat unit, that the partisans saved his life, and that almost the entire time he had the feeling he was on the run.
I remember that I rarely saw Father emerge from his political reservation as fully as he did following a rare excursion to Slovenia with the Partisan Association.
On his return home, he raves about how well received the Carinthian partisans were in Yugoslavia. He describes how much pomp and circumstance surround the partisans in Slovenia, how supportive they appear of their state and how conscious of their power, how there is still something militant about them, which you can only say about the functionaries when it comes to the Carinthian partisans. He mentions the impressive partisan chorus from Trieste and hums a few fighting songs, as if for emphasis to show that he can still sing or hum along. Here, partisans are always bad-mouthed as bandits and murderers, he says, like after that ceremony in Klagenfurt when we were given awards
sent by the Yugoslavian president Tito in recognition of our service in the resistance against National Socialism. It turned into a riot in which his cousin Peter grabbed one of the hecklers and threw him in the bushes. He felt then that they had kept some of their fighting spirit, Father says. In any case, he and few companions quickly drove to Eisenkappel and ordered goulash and beer at the Koller inn. We left the certificates in the car or there would have been another brawl at the Koller, Father says.
A few years later, Father receives a medal from the Austrian president for his service in the liberation of Austria. Father says that he’s proud of his medal and that he’s going to have the certificate framed. All the same, he is convinced that politics are a swindle and simply lead people like him around by the nose.
Political occasions of the Carinthian variety, funerals, or family reunions trap Father in the past and he has difficulty finding his way out again. He’s tormented for weeks after an encounter in an inn during which someone he had been drinking with told him he was responsible for his own misfortune and it was his father and mother’s fault that he ended up in this situation. If his father hadn’t joined the partisans and fought against Hitler and for the Slovenians, then nothing would have happened to him. Why does he get so worked up, whoever says A, also has to say B, the boor said and none of the others wanted to speak against him because alcohol had gotten the better of them all. Father is hit hard and I am distressed because I sense that he loses any capacity to defend
himself when he drinks, that it renders him vulnerable to every provocation, every insinuation, every rumor, and that he is immediately ready to doubt himself and defer to those who are taunting him.
Only visits from his closest relatives, his brother and his brother’s family, or the cousins with whom he lived through the war years, make him strangely happy. We children are glad when our sitting room is full of guests chattering happily around a full table. They laugh, tell stories, and sing songs. Occasionally, one of the guests will stand and give a speech. Father weeps without embarrassment and sometimes others cry too, especially his cousin Zofka, of whom Father is particularly fond. When they reminisce about the dramatic day on which Grandmother was arrested and Peter and Tonči recall how humiliating and painful the slaps were that a police officer searching the house had given them, they always mention an older, more restrained, red-haired officer who had tears in his eyes when he looked at the desperate boys. The tears of the policeman who had assisted with Grandmother’s arrest bring tears to the storytellers’ eyes, too, as if the stranger’s emotions were making their own sorrow possible, as if their despair were reflected more convincingly and more vividly in the unknown policeman’s eyes than in their own souls. Michi tells of the Šporns’ daughter who was her age at the time, in other words still a child. Policemen beat her unconscious with the butts of their guns on the bridge to the Kupitz inn in the Remschenig valley because her parents joined the partisans, he says. Her classmate, who later became her husband and who accompanied her home was also almost beaten to death by the police. He still has scars on his ribs from the
beating. Father knows about it. He also claimed that Count Thurn saved the children’s lives. Since the policemen did not stop beating the children even after they were lying on the ground unconscious, the Count stood in front of the children and then had them taken to the Kupitzs’ to be cared for. The police would have taken away thirteen entire families in the Remschenig Valley in a single day if some of them hadn’t been able to escape to the partisans during the arrests, Michi says and asks, can you imagine, in a valley with not even twenty holdings.