Authors: Maja Haderlap
I
N late autumn, Father’s body is caught in a vice of pain that squeezes him mercilessly. His struggle to live frays our nerves. We can hardly bear the thought of his suffering and we start to resent the family doctor who stops by regularly for not being able to alleviate his pain. Father absolutely refuses to go to the hospital, he wants to die at home, that is his express wish, he tells us. By now he can barely move, can hardly sit up anymore. He must relieve himself lying down. He’s not happy about it, but now and then he has to groan loudly, he says, the pain is too great. Every touch is torture and our helpless hands that want to soothe him are a punishment.
Relatives and neighbors come to visit, saying they want to chat with him. They bring wine because Father once said that he’d like to drink a glass or two every day. It’s necessary, he claims. More than anything, he’d like to drink a whole bottle of plum schnapps, if he were certain he could handle it.
I very much want Father to be able to die at peace, but he is far from reconciled to what’s coming. I even imagine that he’s asking for help when he looks at me. One day he says, in my room there’s a notebook of Mici’s in my night table drawer. Take it. It’s for you. I stop myself from asking if the thought that he might have betrayed Mici when the police were beating her up has been tormenting him. He has never spoken of Mici, but he kept the notebook. Why do I not ask? Does his agitation have something to do with Mother, with whom he has had a marriage filled with rancor and strife? Would he like to reconcile with her and does he lack the energy to do so? Is his fear a last rebellion against the loss of life that he experiences as a pitiful remnant within or is there something unspoken, something older that’s choking him? I will never know.
On January 3rd, on his birthday, we will drink a glass of wine with Father.
Three days later, his face will turn pale and bloodless. He will tell me that yesterday, on his name day, his cousins had come to visit. They had laughed and sung, it was a circus, he says. The celebration wore him out so completely, he’ll probably die. In the meantime, I should go and look at how many bottles of wine were given as gifts. I go to the backroom and count the bottles. Thirty-three, I say. Well, I’ll have to live a long while yet, Father says with a forced smile.
The next morning, my brother calls to tell me Father is dead. He passed away in the early morning hours.
When I arrive home, Father is laid out on the sickbed in his black suit. Mother washed and dressed his body. She stands up from the sick bed when I enter the room and she gestures towards him with her hand. Here he is, she says, weeping. He has finished with it all.
The community gives us permission to lay Father out at home. A last exception.
When the casket is delivered, Pepi comes and pauses on the doorstep to recite an ancient farewell prayer, which he is now the last to know. Pepi helps my brother set up the trestles for the bier under the south-facing windows in the sitting room. Father is laid in the casket and lifted onto the bier. I comb his hair for the last time. Touching his head, it feels like I am caressing a stone. Mother interlaces Father’s fingers and places a cross in his folded hands.
The casket with the corpse is bathed in a white, winter morning light. The sitting room is like a wide ship drifting slowly on the open sea: the glittering light, the muted sounds of daily life, the whispering in the kitchen, the silent weeping, the sunlight reflected on the snow, the brownish violet spots on Father’s forearms, the white of the shroud, the crocheted lace border, the open door, the whining of the dog on its chain outside that has caught the scent of death, the unhurried movements, the open tenderness, long desired and no longer willing to be masked.
The room is not yet filled with mourners, with flowers or wreaths or candles, we still have time to draw the deceased near in order to release him again. No one knows when he or she will take leave of the deceased,
but they each engage in this hidden act. I use the pauses between prayers and the hours in which only one or two mourners linger in the room to observe Father’s lifeless form, his milky yellow skin, his sunken eyes. He seems to have frozen in his last moment and to have been seized with fear. He looks as if he were holding in his last breath, as if he had frozen this breath, put it aside, retaining it for later, for some other time.
Over the next two days, people stream into the house to say goodbye to Father. We are busy serving the visitors, who in turn help us keep our countenance.
On the evening before the burial, Mother sits next to me by the casket. She places her hand on my thigh without a word and leans her shoulder against mine, a sisterly gesture. Has she returned to me as a sister, I wonder, and I try to give her a hug. It’s all fine, I say when she stands up and returns to the kitchen.
The day of Father’s funeral, the pallbearers come at an early hour. They are the hunters from Lepena. We share some soup near the deceased whose casket has been closed. Pepi recites the ancient prayer again. The coffin is lifted out through the living room window and is laid on the doorstep. The deceased is encouraged to take leave of his home and his family. With slow steps, they carry him across the courtyard and again he’s encouraged to bid farewell to his fields, pastures, and slopes.
As the gravediggers lower Father into the pit after Mass and the coffin is laid in the ground, I believe I hear an exhalation that comes either from
me or from the casket. An exhalation emitted straight from a small, dark throat and echoing far and wide. Shocked, I look into the grave. Is it my breath or Father’s, is it my relief that I finally have his loss behind me or is it Father’s blocked, conserved, gagging breath now drawing in air, finally released from any restraints and floating away?
So be it, so be it, I think on the drive back to the city.
I
DREAM that the region I am fleeing is frozen. The sky is a glacier in which the valley appears like a mirage. Fissures of light streak through the frozen surface like crystalline borders. A frozen carapace of air has enclosed the valley beneath it and is constricting it. Crabs, snails, jellyfish, leeches, worms, and mottled amphibians crawl across the surface of the ice. The water that has lain like a coat of crystal over the hills, the trees, and the properties, that nestled, supple and light, protectively against everything, now begins to move. In the next moment, at the slightest breath of wind, I think, it will evaporate, blow away, scatter, and drain away. Nothing can remain the way it is.
Later I hear a rushing sound growing ever louder coming from the valley and suddenly I see the water beginning to rise. I say to my brother, come on, we have to go, we have to leave the house! We hurry to the forest, above the slope with the old plum trees, as we did when Father chased us with his shotgun. We watch the house fill with water, we hear the orebodies collapse deep within the massive mountain. The mineral deposits are used up, nothing more will be extracted, the tunnels are
flooded. Then the water drains away and we return to our home. Water stains and smears of dirt line the walls, the flood has left its mark. The windows are closed and the panes of glass intact. I am amazed that the windows could withstand the mass of water and tell my brother, we have to clean up, we have to clean it all up!
A
FTER Father’s funeral, my mind sinks into a stupor.
Standing by his grave, I return to the familiar silence, to the leaving of things unsaid that had always characterized our conversations.
At home we sit across from one another, each of the siblings bearing the weight of their own father, each one with a father figure hanging around their neck and we stare at each other, tired from carrying our father’s weight, exhausted by the stories and the memories that always sound like reproaches when we recount them to each other, you have no idea what Father and I, and so on. And this, too, the various echoes and feelings, the different acts of rebellion, grief mixed with disappointment.
Mother has reached a nadir in her state of exhaustion that has lasted months, if not years, and she wanders through the house high-strung and irritable. She believes she has gotten through the worst, that she has reached an ending. She feels responsible for everything and is convinced that we, who have witnessed her efforts, don’t appreciate them enough. She accompanied Father to his death. His last glance was directed at
her, she says and shivers with horror at the thought of all that cannot be solved or expressed.
And I, child of my child-father, ridiculous, simply ridiculous to chain myself and my life to the past, to old suffering because of him, to jeopardize my life, and would like to leave it all untouched, to push away all that is repressed, all that obligates and burdens me. It should all be left undisturbed for a time, I decide, to age on its own.
But I am not left in peace. In forgetful Carinthia, I learn how to be unable to forget. The ground on which I stand must have an invisible underside that is saturated with what has been, from which I seem to grow and onto which I am always thrown back. Again and again, the region falls prey to a kind of vertigo in which it claims a version of history that is nothing more than a phantom justification through which it believes itself on the right side. All those crushed under the wheels of National Socialism are excluded from this self-image.
Now and then I flinch in my thoughts, it’s all still present, I think, all of it. It’s all festering inside me and around me, visible or invisible, audible or inaudible, as if I were a micro-organism, a spark of consciousness, a wheel that becomes a chain or bouncing ball, a field that blooms or disintegrates. I seem caught in the middle of an antagonism that Nazism and the resistance against it have created in the inhabitants of the region, an antagonism as absolute as pain. Only those who suffer this antagonism can feel it.
I
N Father’s night table drawer, next to his long unused clarinet, I find Mici’s blue songbook and stored underneath it, my grandmother’s stained, red camp notebook.
Stunned, I sit down on the bed. The small legacy weighs heavy in my hand. The exuberant Mici wrote Slovenian songs, poems, and letters in verse to her lover and to her aunts Katrca, Urša, Leni, Malka, and Angela in her small notebook, turning language into an exhilarating rush of sound, an uninterrupted song. It’s the only thing left of her.
I start reading Grandmother’s camp notebook, which I’d often held in my hands as a child.
Memories of Grandmother’s room come flooding back, memories of the very particular milky light that transformed the incomprehensible things she was telling me into brief moments of intimacy that circled in the air like fine particles of dust and by the next night lay upon the objects in the room as if nothing had ever disturbed them.
At first Grandmother wrote in a firm hand, her words are awkward, not intended to be written down, but to be spoken. Although she can barely write – her sentences are neither grammatically nor syntactically correct – she must have been convinced her story had to be set down.
Je bilo u tork opoldne 12 Oktober je locitev od hise in od temalih Sinov Tonček in Zdravko. Toje bilo hudo zamene ker jas nisem kriva nic
. It was midday on Tuesday, the 12th of October, the separation from my home and my two little boys, Tonček and Zdravko. It was hard for me because I’m not guilty, Grandmother writes.
She was held in the Eisenkappel jail for two hours, then taken to Klagenfurt, and after three weeks, at six in the morning on November 2nd, from Klagenfurt to Maribor. It was wonderful,
čudovito
, she writes, how children spat at us on the street and screamed terrible things. In Maribor, they were given a dinner of potatoes and turnips.
At three in the morning there was good coffee and good bread. We were allowed to take a slice of bread, a bit of soft cheese, and a spoonful of jam as provisions for the trip to Vienna. In Vienna,
Ven
, Grandmother writes, she had to sleep on a cement floor. The food was terrible, there was only potato soup, and no spoons, she had to fish out the pieces of potato with her fingers. After ten days, they went on to Prague,
Prak
, she writes, there they were plagued with bedbugs, the food was bad, there was no dinner, in the mornings just a bit of coffee, then on and on without food or water to Berlin. They were left for a night and a day with nothing to eat. It was good she was sick at the time, her
throat hurt too much to swallow. Then they went on to Ravensbrück, there it was very strange, she writes, humans are not animals!
She has no words to describe all the unhappy things to come, she writes. She needs only three small pages for one and a half years in the concentration camp, then she writes
rajža
, the journey, on April 28th and means the beginning of the odyssey that would bring her back to Lepena months later. On May 14th, Mirow, the first place name before Wesenberg and Rheinsberg, written in a feverish script that betrays her excitement. She writes phonetically the names of the places where she stops on her way home or simply passes through. The longer her trip home lasts, the more disjointed the names become. She notes them down in the moving cattle car, later in the train compartment. The places of survival seem bombed out, just as the cities Grandmother had talked about must have looked. August 15th, Dresden,
Tresten
, Grandmother writes. After a few, barely legible names, Bratislava appears, spelled correctly, then Budapest, on August 24th,
Subotica
, we have been in the best of moods, she writes. There was much meat to eat and a lot of schnapps, spent the 25th in the baths and danced and celebrated all weekend. Later she writes
Belkad
, meaning Belgrade, beautiful city, Grandmother declares, on August 30th, a sad morning in the Zagreb train station, then
Vellenje
and
Slovenkrac
for Slovenian Gradec, then
Hrevelje
for the Hrevelnik property in Lepena. She closes the account of her travels with the half sentence, at home was the fear yes or no,
doma toje blo strah jabol ne
.