Authors: Maja Haderlap
M
OTHER works outside. At breakfast I can see her working in the barn. A wicker basket on her back, she hurries over to the threshing floor and then back to the stalls. Her feet firmly planted, she leans over the feeding trough, from which steam rises, and mixes handfuls of cut and sifted hay into the pig slop. When she passes the house carrying tools, she usually comes up to the kitchen window to look for me. She knocks on the windowpane and calls out, where is my
kokica
, my little chick. Sometimes she just winks and leaves without a word.
She wears brighter aprons than Grandmother and loves to sing while she works.
Following the direction her singing comes from, I can figure out where she is at any given time. If she’s in a cheerful mood, she lures me outdoors with pet names she also uses for the animals and gives me a chore to do or hugs me tightly. Her caresses are rough. She reaches for me the way Grandmother grabs at the chickens and pulls me close. She tickles and bites me when I try to get away. Whenever she’s feeling
dejected, she won’t let me near her. Her sorrow has a magnetic attraction for me. In such moments, I want to climb over her like a cat in a tree and look down, from the top of her head, into her eyes, to lick her cheeks, to rub her nose a bit and sink my claws into her back should she ever try to shake me off. Mother certainly has no sympathy for my desires. As soon as I touch her hip, she pushes me away like a mother animal her young and asks when I might be planning to do the chore she assigned me. Now, I say, hoping Grandmother has heard everything and will take over my duties, which she gladly does, if only to annoy Mother.
Sometimes I find Mother crying in her and my father’s bedroom. At those times she sits on the bed with her rubber boots still on her feet. She doesn’t like it when I surprise her in this state. What are you looking for, she asks. You, I answer, you! Her despair must be very great because her rubber boots and her stained apron don’t go at all with the light linen coverlet embroidered with colorful flowers spread over the marriage bed.
On mild evenings she sits in the meadow behind the house and looks at the sky or leans against the wooden balcony on the south side of the outbuilding where no one can see her. One day she is kneeling in the entrance hall in front of a refrigerator that has just been delivered. What’s the point of that gadget, Grandmother rails in the kitchen, it only costs money. Mother wipes the refrigerator with a soft rag she keeps dipping into a washbowl of hot water and wringing out again. Every household needs a refrigerator like this nowadays, she answers stubbornly.
Nonsense, Grandmother replies, she’s never owned a refrigerator, no one needs such a gadget.
One evening Mother hangs two small, framed pictures of angels over my bed in the room I share with Grandmother. After my brother came, I stopped sleeping in the outbuilding with my parents and moved into Grandmother’s room, which I’m happy about because she is the pillar of my childhood. As she hammers two small nails into the wall for the pictures, Mother says she’s brought me two guardian angels to watch over me. This young man with curly blond hair and wings growing out of his back is supposed to protect me. He’s a careless young man, I decide, since he wears impractical open-toed sandals as he leads two children over a suspension bridge. A deep mountain canyon yawns below. Mother recites the prayer
sveti angel varuh moj, bodi vedno ti z menoj, stoj mi dan in noč ob strani, vsega hudega me brani, amen
with me and tells me that angels can see into a person’s soul and read their most secret thoughts.
I look skeptically at the well-fed, chubby-cheeked beings because I don’t believe my thoughts are there to be spied on and because I’m worried the angels are too naive and inexperienced to protect me. Their dreamy, misty-eyed gaze is directed at the heavens and, while half-naked, the few clothes they do wear seem expensive. They play the strangest instruments and are at home in the clouds, not on earth. I ask myself if these winged creatures really want to know everything and see all I’d rather keep secret. Although I do like the singing girlish boys and would like to
see swarms of them perching on church altars and frescos like swallows on electric lines in late summer, they make me uneasy.
One morning when I get up, it strikes me that my father must have fallen from heaven or from a bridge. He’s lying on the kitchen floor, his face covered with blood. Grandmother slides a pillow under his head and covers him with a woolen blanket. Mother has placed a washbasin filled with cold water next to him. She wants to wipe the blood off his cheeks but he raises his hand defensively.
We can’t just leave him lying here, Mother says in a strained voice.
Leave him alone, if that’s what he wants, Grandmother orders and pushes Mother aside.
When Father notices me huddled against the stove in distress, he smiles. A small stream of blood gushes from his mouth and rolls down his cheek and seeps into his light shirt collar.
He’s lost his teeth, Mother wails and bolts out of the kitchen. She stops outside the door and plucks at the flowers that are just beginning to bloom in the window boxes. What happened, I want to know. Father fell off his motorcycle, Mother sobs, we have to call the doctor. Then she runs off.
Father is driven to the doctor that afternoon. A neighbor picks him up in his car.
He’s had lots of guardian angels, Mother says. Did the angels cushion the motorcycle’s fall, I wonder, or did they wake the neighbor who found him lying in the field and helped him get up? I need to rethink the whole angel situation, I decide, maybe they’re not as useless as I thought.
F
ATHER likes wearing corduroy knickerbockers best. When he walks, the clasps swing against his calves because in his hurry he forgets to fasten them. He has a purposeful gait and always seems to need to rub his hands with impatience or delight. In summer, he leaps barefoot into the wooden clogs set out by the front door. In winter, he shoves his stocking feet so impatiently into the leather lining of his wooden shoes that bulges of wool form around the most frequently darned spots. Everything is set in motion when he hurries across the courtyard. The dog Piko runs back and forth on his chain, the cats come up to the barn door, the sows in their pens make piercing noises. Mother rushes into the barn carrying buckets sloshing with pig swill.
Father has already set the cows loose from the rope and herds them towards the water trough. He doesn’t have time to grab the hazelnut switch kept near the barn door and guides the stumbling animals with his hand and yells. Sometimes it sounds like he’s cheering.
The cows are too slow for his pace. They’ve barely returned to their places before he has lost patience and begun cursing and flailing his arms, as
if shooing away bothersome flies. When he carries hay into the stalls and, from the threshold, shouts the name of the cow that should move to make room for him, that particular cow actually moves aside so he can stuff their fodder into the crib. His movements are sweeping and rhythmic. Cleaning the pigsty has to run like a well-oiled machine, the muckrake has to dig into a pile of straw with one thrust, the shovel must scrape the floor of the stall in a steady cadence. The steaming cowpats are only waiting to be lifted from the manure gutter and conveyed to the dung heap. You can read Father’s mood from the cowpats’ flight. If he tosses the manure in a high arc to the back of the heap, he’s feeling confident. If he flings the cowpats hard against the front of the manure pile, he’s irate.
The pigs throng against the pivoting gate to the trough. Mother shoves the gate back with her boot and urges the animals’ patience. You can all wait just a bit longer, she says and pours the swill in a wide arc into the trough. As soon as the gate swings back, the pigs huddle, slurping, over the mash.
Mother begins milking. She wipes the first cow’s udder with a cloth, then squats on the stool and braces her head against the animal’s flank. Her grip on the teats draws a powerful stream of milk that crashes against the bottom of the pail. On this signal, everything calms down. The pigs slurp more quietly, the hens draw in their heads, the cats gather silently around their drinking bowl, the milk foams in the pail. When she has finished milking the first cow, Mother gives the cats milk to drink. She
pours the milk into a bowl Father carved from a piece of wood. Pink cat tongues flap against the white liquid, the cats’ jaws are wet with milk. Their tongues lick the milk from their fur.
I stand, snug in a veil of haze and cast a glance over the dirty walls. My hands smell of the pigs that press their massive bodies against the gate when they’re done eating in the hope that I’ll scratch their backs. The dog Piko has wiped his morning’s sweat on my dress. Cat hairs, damp with milk, are already stuck to my cheeks. I ask Mother when the next calf will come because I love feeding animals with a bottle. The way they butt with their heads as they nurse always makes me laugh. After I feed the calves, I always let them lick my hands until I become afraid my whole arm might disappear into the warm gullets behind their nubbly tongues. You’ll have to wait a bit longer, Mother says. Father stands outside the barn door and looks at the sky. Fine weather is coming, he says, we’ll have to get a move on tomorrow, fine weather is coming!
On warm spring weekends, Father sits on the bench next to the beehive and watches the bees’ flight. He has one arm draped over the back of the bench and acts as if he wouldn’t mind my sitting next to him. He looks at the alighting boards in front of the hives’ entrance holes where the foragers land and perform their waggle dances. There will be a good harvest this year, he’ll say, or, I’m worried about the second hive. In late winter, when the thaw sets in, he shovels the snow in front of the apiary so the sun will warm the area in front of the hives more quickly. He has made wooden hive frames, stretched wires across them and pressed sheets of
wax onto the wires. He brought the honeycomb into the apiary and swept the piles of dead bees from the apiary floor. On the last day in January, he sent me into the bee-house to listen to the hives, to hear if the colonies were giving any signs of life. When I told him there was a mysterious humming, he looked like a weight had fallen from his shoulders. Now he asks if I’d be willing to help him do the spring check and smoke the hives. I nod and immediately sense that I’ve made a mistake, but it’s too late to retreat.
The apiary is filled with semi-darkness. A milky light shines through a small, smudged window onto the wooden building’s far wall. Next to the window stand two wardrobes in which Grandmother keeps her clothes. Beehives tower along the front like a broad buzzing wall. In spring, woolen blankets are still draped over the hives. In a separate back room is the honey extractor and fresh sheets of beeswax are piled on a small table near the door.
Father is glad when I go into the apiary with him. He says he doesn’t like to work alone and presses the smoker into my hands. With a gentle grip, he opens the first hive and I reach the smoker inside the case. I run back outside right away. One by one, Father pulls the honeycombs out of the hive. With an eagle feather, he brushes away the bees hanging onto the frame and takes each honeycomb outside to check it. I wait at a suitable distance until Father comes out carrying a honeycomb crowded with bees and summons me with a nod of his head so that I can get a look at the seething mass. The first to find the queen bee gets to cheer. Stretching my neck, I bend over the colony and call out
matica, matica
,
as soon as I’ve spotted the queen. Father sighs and looks for the queen cells with the tip of his feather. Sometimes he sweeps a colony, made weak by winter, as he says, away from the entrance of another hive and hopes that the weakened bees will be taken in by a neighboring colony. He tells me to stay calm and not make any sudden movements. He says he chose the right day, the bees have flown out and I don’t need to worry, no one will get stung on a day like this. I don’t entirely trust his confidence because I’ve often seen him swollen with beestings. Father likes to blow his cigarette smoke on the bees’ backs. They especially like that, he says, his tobacco can tame the fiercest creatures. He smiles when he sees me draw my head in, afraid an angry worker bee will attack me.
Grandmother usually comes into the apiary to ask about the state of the bee colonies. She takes a small brown notebook with yellowed pages from a drawer in the wardrobe and notes down the size of the colonies and the number of queens. The cover of the notebook is emblazoned with the German Imperial Eagle. Under the insignia is written Employment Record Book, Name and Location, Nationality:
Deutsches Reich
. This notebook belonged to your grandfather, she says, though he never used it. He took over the farm on February 1st, 1927 and married on February 27th, 1927, that’s recorded in the notebook, Grandmother tells me. She kept a record of all the rest on the inside of the wardrobe door, where the dates of marriages and deaths are listed in pencil.
Grandmother can’t bear to throw anything away, Father says, she even uses the old Hitler stuff until it completely falls apart. Nonsense, Grandmother retorts, the winter coat, the one she keeps in this closet, for
example, she only wore it once and won’t ever put it on again. She opens the wardrobe and points at a dark gray-green wool coat folded up on the floor. She “organized” it in Ravensbrück and from then on didn’t let it out of her sight, she says. She wore the coat on the day the camp was evacuated. It remained her best coat. Yeah, yeah, Father says and turns back to the bees. I cast a curious look at the coat before Grandmother closes the wardrobe door again and goes to get a jar of honey from the back room with the extractor. I’m surprised she used the word “organized,” which I’d never heard from her lips before. It must have something to do with the secret activity that kept her alive in the camp, I think.
As soon as summer is palpable and you can’t go into the fields because grass has grown high, the bees call attention to themselves again after a brief rain shower. On such days you can hear the hum of a swarm flying to a branch that protrudes near the house or hanging from a tree at some distance from the farm like a seething cluster of grapes. Father is called from all corners of the farm, he must bring the escapees back to the old queen.