Authors: Maja Haderlap
His work done, he will cross the courtyard and sit down on the front doorstep or will nod off at the kitchen table. He will feel worthless and deprived of speech. His headaches and stomachaches will turn him
into a groaning body that gets in its own way and would like to get rid of itself.
He will watch his children, he won’t push them to work, won’t issue a single order, now and then he will ask them to do something, he will leave the commands to his wife, he will delight in their efforts, will resign himself to their stubbornness, he won’t take them seriously, will court their affection, and will believe them lost because of their youth. He will lose confidence and be happy when anyone is friendly towards him, he won’t forget any act of kindness, will be astonished by it, and will be touched by any show of helpfulness and respect.
He will believe in death because death, like violence, can change everything. He will want to throw his life out of the window, as he will put it, let’s throw ourselves out the window, clear out, let’s laugh, drink, work ourselves to death. What could possibly happen when he climbs up on his tractor, dead drunk, and drives away, when he tries to pull logs through an impassable section of the mountainside with a cable attached to his tractor and the front wheels lift, so what if he uses the circular saw with only one good eye? When will they finally feel sorry for him, when will they appreciate all he does?
If only he didn’t suffer from this inertia which takes more effort every year to overcome. He can’t move, he doesn’t know how to beat the resistance within, the torpor that holds him captive. How do you withstand the deterioration you bring on yourself, the withering of the body?
As soon as his strength begins to wane, withered branches start to appear on the fruit trees, their crowns thicken, the new shoots wither,
the number of animals in the stable dwindles, the fields he had been leasing are reclaimed by the owner. As soon as he gives up his work in the forests, the farmers’ felling strips turn into clear cut slopes, on which the logging seems more like pillaging.
He will give up hunting, unable to keep up with the young ones or hit the prey having only one good eye. His bee colonies become infested with mites, the floors of the bee-houses are littered with legs of bees, bits of wax, mutilated insects. He will take the bees one by one and will scrape the mite larvae from their crumpled wings, an abdomen will detach from a thorax.
One summer day, he will finally lay his resolve as a farmer to rest. I will spend that Sunday with him.
H
IS favorite cow was about to calve. He and Mother could not agree when the animal should be brought down from the summer pastures and housed in the stable.
On that Sunday morning, he wants to check on her but can’t find her. He calls and paces up and down the pasture, he notices that the fence has been torn down near a steep, dangerous drop, the grass and bushes are matted down, he calls to me to come with him. We have to go down, he says, the cow might have fallen into the gulch when the labor pains set in. We slide down the steep slope, holding onto the hazel bushes and rampant goat’s beard, and find the cow lying in the stream, its legs folded underneath it, the calf protruding half way out of its vagina, cold and lifeless, drowned on its way into life, the mucus washed away by the cold water, its slippery coat ashen, drenched. Father groans and pulls the dead calf out of the cow. How long has she been lying in the water, he laments, how long. The animal tries to stand up and looks at us pitifully. Father wraps his arm around the cow’s neck. Stand up, stand up, he begs the animal and it rears up, but its feet and fetlocks collapse. She has a fever, Father says, we have to get Pepi and pull her from the water.
When Pepi arrives with his tractor and realizes he and Father won’t be able to pull the cow from the streambed alone, more neighbors are called to help. Father stands with his shoes in the stream, soaked to his knees and shivering. I lay my forehead on the cow’s face and see faint white steam rising from its trembling back. Its eyes emit such a profound creaturely sorrow, the men will not look at the animal because the sight will remind them of something they cannot bear at this moment.
I stumble home and return to the scene of the accident with rubber boots for Father. In the meantime, the men have tried to get the cow onto its feet, but its injuries from the fall are too serious. Pepi says they will have to shoot her, there’s nothing else they can do. Father blows his nose into his handkerchief. He’s weeping. Go get your gun, let’s get it over with quickly, he asks of Pepi and lays his hand on the cow’s curly forehead.
Pepi gets his rifle and when he’s standing in the water he says to Father that calving cows cannot die, he really doesn’t want to do this, only out of friendship will he take care of it, though it’s unbearable.
I turn away, I don’t want to see any more.
Right after, they haul the dying cow out of the water with the tractor and drag it to the street, the dead calf and afterbirth are placed beside it, and a tarpaulin is spread over this misery.
The men go home.
Father says he doesn’t want to do this anymore, he will never forgive Mother for leaving the cow in the pasture so long, even Pepi had wept when he had to shoot the cow.
It’s already dark when Mother arrives home. She gets off her moped and hurries into the kitchen. She saw the dead cow and the calf on the side of the road and stopped, she says, panting, she called the cow’s name and the animal lifted its head and looked at her, Good Lord, she saw a ghost, Mother continues, her heart shrank, how could this happen!
As my parents’ argument swells, I leave the house.
I drive slowly down the access road.
The property has plunged into darkness. The forest seems to be slipping into the depths, the rushing of the stream is interspersed with tiny needles that prick my ears. When I pass the covered cow, I stop but do not get out of the car.
At night I dream that the valleys and slopes are turned inward towards the mountain’s core, like the lining of a coat. The darkness that surrounded me on the way to town persists in the mountains. Daylight is concentrated in small suns, which, as I am aware, occasionally bathe everything in a glittering light and then retreat. They hang in the firmament like weightless yellow balls. I’m in a hurry to get home because something terrible has happened. I know that mother is in the sitting room and could help me. I want to find her and yank open the door. A horrifying creature lunges at me, half-girl, half-lizard. I fling it against the side of the house, against the cliffs, against the mountain. I call for Mother, but she remains distant. When I can no longer move my feet, I start to hover and float into the void.
M
Y parents decide to sell their last cow. Father comes down with pneumonia and does not leave the house for two weeks. It has all hit him to the marrow, Mother says. They have decided to stop raising animals, they have to stick to the most essential, to what they can still manage, she says.
Father’s lungs are slowly deteriorating and his weight dwindles along with his breath. After he has recovered from the bout of pneumonia, his upper body resembles a beetle’s carapace, from which protrudes a head drawn in between his shoulders and two arms and two legs similar to an insect’s slender limbs. Father’s fragile rib cage presses against his crooked spine like a wicker basket. His steps grow shorter and slower. The lines in his face are rough furrows. Bones are Father’s most striking feature, his knobby knees, his thin, sinewy forearms, his exhausted fingers. The distances he is still able to cover grow shorter and his outings less frequent. He hesitates for a long time before gathering his strength to go into the forest to chop firewood, repair a fence, or drive the sheep
that have replaced the cows into their pens. Before long he needs to stop and rest in the middle of the courtyard when he goes to get his hard cider from the cellar or to check on his ailing bee colonies and he has to double over because he’s lost his breath. We try to persuade him to carry the portable oxygen tank, to which he is hooked up in the evening, since it would make it easier for him to walk, but he refuses to give in to his weakness, as if it were beneath his dignity. Sometimes, when he feels ill, he holds on to one of the plum trees that border the courtyard.
In the penultimate year of his life, Father receives a payment from the newly founded Austrian National Fund for Victims of National Socialism, a symbolic reparation. Most of all, he is pleased that his suffering has been recognized. He wants to use the money to fix the tractor, he says. If he puts it off much longer, the tractor will die before he does.
In the spring, he makes his last careful attempts to prune the apple tree and remove the branches broken under the weight of the snow. He is like a wizened child who would like to spend the entire day up in a tree, but has to climb down the ladder so as not to risk a fall. In early summer, he must admit defeat and stay in bed. He is hooked up to a breathing device. Without oxygen he can just barely manage to go to the toilet or take a bath. Mother and my brother have moved his bed to the sitting room so he can take part in daily life and visitors can comfortably sit with him and not have the feeling they are in a sick room. Medications pile up on the side table Mother has placed next to his bed. Father abhors being taken care of by Mother, but Mother has decided she will nurse him. Whether
or not he wants her to, whether or not she wants to, she believes it is her duty to endure the closeness necessitated by his illness.
Father suffers a great deal. His face is slightly swollen from the medication, his hands, in contrast, have become softer and more delicate. When he sits up in bed, he looks at us like someone who is smiling as he drowns, holding his head above water in the certainty that he will soon go under. He doesn’t want to sign over his property, he’s at a loss, he says in response to my urging, he sees no future for his holding and doesn’t want to think about the decline of his farm. It’s up to us to work out an agreement after his death.
He begins to take an interest in my work and asks questions, what it is I do in the theater, what does a dramaturge do, he asks if I earn enough money, if the public in Carinthia likes our work. Once he informs me that he watched a production of
Nabucco
on television. A broadcast from the National Opera, Father says, the National Opera in Vienna! In one scene, photographs of murdered Viennese Jews were held up on signs. He thought that was a good idea, just think, Viennese Jews, he says.
When we sit around the old farm table on Sundays and spoon up our noodle soup, he looks at us, shakes his head and says with feigned seriousness, you’re all half-wits, a bunch of half-wits! Our soup spoons pause in the air for a moment. I can’t help but guffaw, which particularly pleases him, all the more since it makes Mother grimace.
Father only becomes lively when his cousins visit. He even lets his careless relatives persuade him to play the accordion, which completely
exhausts him. But what won’t we do to cheat illness a bit, he tells himself, even if all that’s left of him after the exuberant celebration is a pained grin which he forces himself to maintain with great effort. He can no longer play cards, but he likes to watch his sons and neighbors play. On weekends he asks Bertl, his successor in hunting, to tell him what’s new in the hunting ground, what animals have been seen leaving the forest to graze, or what they plan to do to contain the game browsing.
One day Father’s cousin Kati comes to visit. She is preparing a song recital with Mother. The women created a duo to present their own poems set to music, Marian songs, and partisan songs.
Like Kati, Mother has begun setting her poems to music and dreams of publishing them in a book. I’d like to have my own book someday, she says, pushing a few of her texts or poems across the table for me to read.
When I ask Father how he’s doing that day, he says, how do you think I’m doing? I’ve been listening to those two women practicing next to me for two hours. It’s not exactly uplifting.
With your voices, you’re going to scare away the audience, he sneers. After such howling, the crowd will have thinned out. Enough out of you, button your lip, Kati tells him. Shall we sing something for you?
Yes, Father says impishly, he’d like to hear Katrca’s song again. The women stand at the foot of his bed and start singing:
Pihljaj vetrič mi hladan doli na Koroško plan, tam, kjer dom moj prazen zdaj stoji, hiti tja oj vetrič ti! Ne bom njegovega več vinca pil, v njegovi senci se ne bom
hladil, njegove njive ne bom več oral, le nesi zadnji mu pozdrav! Ko boš izpolnil mojo mi željo, takrat, o vetrič, mene večne bo. Življenje svoje sem že dokončal. Bom v tuji zemlji mirno spal
. Oh, dear cool breeze, blow towards the fields of Carinthia, where my house stands empty, alas, hurry, dear breeze. Never again will I drink wine, never again will the shadow of my house cool me, never again will I plow my field. Carry my final greeting with you! As soon as you have granted me my final wish, dear wind, I will be no more. I will have ended my life and will lie at peace in foreign ground.
Father is satisfied. After sitting down, Kati says she always gets tears in her eyes when she sings that song because it makes her think of Katrca and of her dead mother, Urša, who was Katrca’s sister. Before Katrca died, she had sent the poem from the Ravensbrück concentration camp with the request that Urša set it to music so it wouldn’t be forgotten. Her mother composed a melody for the poem, Kati explains. She set many poems to music, mostly her own. And yet her mother couldn’t even write, she was illiterate. She composed the poems in her head while working in the fields all day and then dictated them to her husband in the evening. That’s how her plays, stories, and poems came to be. Her mother was the real poet in the family, a better poet than she herself is, Kati says, that much she has to admit, though she has written a lot recently.
Our family is a poet’s nest, it’s enough to make you lose your mind, Father says giving Mother and me a mischievous look. In our family it’s like the annual fair, one poet after another, you can barely escape all the poems. Besides, he wrote a poem himself, when he was twelve years old,
with the partisans. He can remember one stanza, Father says:
Ko pasel sem jaz kravce, je prišel policist, v oreh me je obesil in mislil, da sem list
. As I was taking the cows to pasture, a policeman came and hung me from the walnut tree. He thought I was foliage. Father sits on his bed and grins.