Authors: Maja Haderlap
On weekends, Mother sends me to the tavern to get Father because, as she puts it, he forgot to come home. She doesn’t want to fetch him anymore because he behaves impossibly on the way home and enough is enough, Mother says.
The kitchen at the Rastočniks’ tavern is smoky and filled with cooking fumes. When I open the door someone inside yells that the command to retreat has sounded. Father sits grinning against the wall at the large guest table. I sit next to him on the wooden bench. You should come home, I say, as if he didn’t already know. You think so, he asks and orders another beer for himself and a lemonade for me.
The waitress brings the drinks quickly and asks what’s new at home and how things are at school. Are you happy about the new house, she wants to know. I nod and look at Father quizzically. It’ll be something, he says, it will be my ruin.
Go on, says Pepi, one of my mother’s cousins, you don’t have to sign on to every stupidity. It’s a good time to build, hasn’t Father noticed there’s a cement mixer in front of almost every house. Yes, goddamn it, Father responds and draws on his cigarette.
It’s night when we leave the tavern. On the way home, Father argues with invisible adversaries. Sometimes he points at the sky and says, the Big Dipper, you see, or there, the Little Dipper. I walk beside him at a suitable distance and avoid touching him. Did Mother send you, he suddenly asks and he sounds more irritable than before. No, I lie, it was Grandmother. I see, he mumbles and walks on in silence.
At home Grandmother puts a glass of fortified wine and a cup of gentian tea on the table, the herb that cures a thousand ills, she says. Father should drink the tea before he goes to sleep. I ask Mother if Father is sick. He has stomach pains, she says, and lies awake almost every night. She can’t sleep either when he groans with pain. But he refuses to see a doctor. Maybe it has to do with the coming changes, she supposes. We’re getting a new house, and I’ll have my own room. Am I not happy about that, she asks me. I nod, even though the thought of leaving Grandmother’s room doesn’t thrill me.
Father spends the next day resting on the bench near the stove. Mother has laid an herbal compress that smells of damp hay on his stomach. At night, the pain made him vomit, but only bile came out, Father tells me, a yellow slime. I give him a worried look and go outside with a guilty conscience because I can’t do anything for him.
I
T’S time for you to walk to the Hrevelnik farm with me, Grandmother says, as long as I’m still on my feet. Soon it will be too late.
One morning she wakes me early and takes a willow rod taller than she is from the granary. Put decent footwear on, she commands, the path is steep.
We start at a leisurely pace, descending the sloping meadow below the house to the municipal road. On the road, Grandmother turns and looks back at our house and its whitewashed walls flashing between the trees. She can’t get used to the idea that the old house is going to be torn down, she sighs. That house sheltered so many generations, how could anyone want to raze it!
We turn onto a road that winds its way through the pastures in broad curves up the shadowy side of the valley to the forest. The landscape dances and sways on the lenses of Grandmother’s glasses. The pastures swing up to the crest of the hill, the tips of the spruce trees sink down into the shaded valley, a fragment of sky glints in the glittering stream running next to the road far below.
In the forest, the path narrows under our feet. After a clearing, it slips down to a streamlet then climbs steeply uphill, as if it wanted to prevent our advance. It is slippery and covered with beech leaves. Our steps set off small avalanches of leaves that slide gently into the depths. Walking is difficult. Grandmother stops and pants after almost every step. She would like to rest by the well up top, she says, there’s nowhere to sit here.
At the beginning of the escarpment, I walk behind her and pass her on more even sections, wondering what I would do if Grandmother stopped and couldn’t continue. In spite of my fears, she shows remarkable tenacity that you would never have suspected given her emaciated form. We climb slowly and doggedly until we reach the turn in the path at the top of the rise, behind which a well is visible. The water flows along a wooden channel into a wooden trough. Grandmother sits on the forest floor next to the well and looks at the house highest up on the valley wall opposite, now at the same elevation as we are. It strikes her that there are changes everywhere she looks, here something’s been built, there something’s been torn down, she says and points at a new access road. The road has torn a scar into the slope, Grandmother says and shakes her head.
After the well, the path runs almost level. Taking long strides, we approach the Hrevelnik property. It lies on the upper end of a gently sloping meadow. The shadow of a sundial vibrates on the whitewashed bulkhead of the main house. The buildings are abandoned. This farm was known far and wide for its sundial, now no one is left, Grandmother says and walks purposefully towards the stables. There was a path behind the stables that led to the Remschenig combe. This is the direction they
came from back then, the women from Lepena who survived the camp, Grandmother begins her story. She was brought across the border near Koprivna illegally. When they climbed over the fence separating Yugoslavia and Austria, they laughed and wept. They flung their arms around each other’s necks because it suddenly seemed so easy to make it home after their long odyssey. Once we crossed the border, walking wasn’t hard at all, Grandmother tells me. They’d been walking all day. When they reached the Hrevelnik farm, night had fallen. She heard someone milking in the barn. She went in and said good evening. The milkmaid fell right off her stool, she was so happy, and the milk sprayed everywhere, Grandmother says. Milka jumped up and screamed, Mitzi, you’re back! We thought you were dead! There are more with me, she answered and pointed at the women standing outside the barn, at Gregorička, Mimi, the Mitzis, at Frida and Malka. All these women who had lived on the farm, they all crowded together. At the Hrevelniks, they told Mimi there was no point in going home, because everything in Kach had been destroyed. Gregorička went to the Rigelniks, hoping they’d take her in, Grandmother says. The Gregorič’s farm was destroyed, her husband died in Auschwitz, and the children were housed with strangers. The women were very upset. At the Hrevelniks they also learned that Grandfather and the boys were already home. Milka gave the women fresh milk to drink. She’ll never forget the taste of that milk, Grandmother says and falls silent.
We sit on a wooden bench placed next to the front door of the house for solitary visitors to sit and rest. Grandmother gives a long, muted groan. After she recovers her strength, we set off. In the Hrevelniks’ lower
meadow, she stops and says that she was afraid at the time she’d no longer be welcome at home. My husband will reject me. I’m not the same person, she had thought to herself. I’ll have to ask him, she decided, so that things are clear right from the start. It was very dark in the forest and in some spots she had to feel her way forward. It was early September.
When we enter the forest, the path is still easy to make out. Behind us, the light on the meadow collapses, as if someone had turned off the lights when we left the Hrevelnik farm.
That evening in bed, Grandmother tells me the rest of the story of her return, how she entered our farm when she finally made it home. She saw a light on in the sitting room, went up to the window and looked in. Her husband was sitting on the bench next to the oven, brooding. He was just taking off his shoes. He had one off already and had put his bare foot on the floor. The other was still on but the laces were untied. Your grandfather was staring into space, Grandmother says, he looked so strange that I had to gather all my courage to knock on the door. Grandfather looked up quickly, but didn’t see her. Then she knocked again. He stood up slowly and went into the hallway. He opened the door and asked, who’s there? She answered from the dark, will you take me back, do you recognize me? Mitzi, you’re back, her husband shouted and hugged her so fiercely that her kerchief slipped off and fell to the ground. He hugged me so hard, the thing flew right off, Grandmother says and smiles. Then the boys, who were already in bed, got up. Mmm, I repeat after her, they got up, and I fall right asleep. Goodnight,
lahko noč
!
T
HE time to tear down the old house approaches like an ineradicable evil. Father and Mother hectically discuss where to store the furniture and appliances from the old house during the construction. The outbuilding will be set up as temporary living quarters. The furniture that does not fit in the small rooms will be moved to the barn.
For days before the move, Grandmother paces through the old house. She touches the fixtures or sits on the oven bench and looks around the room.
She spent so many wonderful evenings here, she tells me, when the house was still full of life, when life had yet to become so sad. We danced and worked in this room, she says, we even put on plays and recited poetry when the girls still lived here. Katrca wrote poems and short plays. We learned them by heart and performed them.
I sit next to Grandmother and in my imagination I see blurry, faceless shadows flit past, their faces become distinct only later. I imagine a play that brings to life this passing parade of our family’s and neighbors’
ghosts. All those who once existed have brought along their clothing and furniture and they sing and act for us. They show us how people amused themselves in earlier days and what made them laugh. They strike poses and spin in circles, they pack up their things and disappear into a wall of emptiness and echoes. A bit of life seems to slip from Grandmother’s frail body, like a puff of air rising to the ceiling. Her breath vibrates like a fleeting memory, a mere shadow of a breath, less than a sigh. The way she has begun to shrink makes me worry she might stiffen right there on the bench or dry up. Later, a hand could brush her slight body from the bench as easily as a dead bee.
Grandmother stands up and takes me by the hand. You know, I hate to give up this kitchen, your grandfather built it for me, she says. She’ll miss the stove but will keep the sideboard no matter what. I follow her parting look as it sweeps over the entrance hall with the wooden stairs that lead to the attic and takes in the attic with its carved and painted chests, the cabinets, in which she’s still hoarding provisions, the roof frame with rafters and beams, the laths and boards, the small skylight on the back wall of the house, the timbered balcony on the front of the house with bundles of herbs hung from nails to dry. I follow her into the smoke kitchen with its blackened walls, which remind me of shriveled or shining prunes depending on the light, and past the oven, which looks like it’s set in the middle of an ashen landscape after a fire storm. Behind it, the larder with its unpainted wooden shelves filled with pots and jars. On the wall, the wooden pottery board holding fired pots full of cracks and held together with twisted wires. In the kitchen, the green sideboard and the food cupboard with tiny holes in its doors and drawer-fronts so
the air can circulate, the prayer corner with the crucifix and pictures of saints, the benches along the walls, the square wooden table with inlaid decorations, the window casements and shutters with traces of mildew. Our bedroom in the back, its inner wall warmed by the tile oven in the kitchen so it’s never cold, the wardrobe, the beds, the wall cupboard in which Grandmother keeps medicines and lotions. The house doors with their doorposts and cast iron locks, the cellar with its vaulted ceiling and shelves on which fruit is stored. The compartments for potatoes, the tub for sauerkraut, the barrels of hard cider.
On the day the excavator drives up to the farm, Grandmother stands on the outbuilding balcony and sobs, now it’s all over, it’s all over! God help me, Mary, Mother of God protect me! I’m so shocked, I start to cry with her. I grab onto her apron and howl so loudly that Grandmother begins hurling reproaches at Father who watches us helplessly, even this child understands what’s happening right now, even the child! Toda, the excavator driver, lays his hand on her shoulder and pleads, calm down, Mitzi, the young ones want to have something of their own.
Grandmother stops weeping and only moans in protest as the last rafters are dropped and the excavator starts smashing the old walls. She pulls me to the front of the house and points at a number that has appeared under the yellowish plaster. 1743, this house has been inhabited since 1743 and now they say it’s not good enough, she exclaims indignantly and begins looking for objects amidst the broken walls. In the past, she assumes, objects were always enclosed in the walls to protect
the house from calamity. She scratches a few shards out of the rubble and, disappointed, tosses them away.
On his breaks, Toda sits with Grandmother. He tells her that lately he has been worried about his brother, who sometimes gets into a state in which he has no idea where he is. At night he escapes into the woods because he thinks the Germans are chasing him. He wanders about in a panic for hours, no one can calm him down. It’s the camp, Grandmother says, it can only be the camp. His brother was still a child when the two of them were deported to the Altötting internment camp, Toda says, what can a child understand? A lot, Grandmother says, a whole lot.
I imagine the excavator driver’s brother as someone who can also see the parade of ghosts and who follows those who have disappeared over hill and dale until he loses sight of them and their things in the dark forest.
When the shovel on Toda’s digger reaches the basement, Father suggests he leave the cellar with its vaulted ceiling and only dig out the area for the second cellar. Maybe he did this to calm Grandmother down and give her the feeling that the new house would stand on the foundation of the old one. The old cellar survives the demolition like a stubborn molar that won’t be extracted.
As the house’s frame rises over the cellar and the first walls are being sheathed, Father is being persuaded to add a second floor to the planned one-story house. After all, his family will grow and the children will need
room. Father agrees and asks everyone who comes to see the construction if it makes sense. He operates the monotonously grinding cement mixer, hauls the mortar to the building site in a wheelbarrow, the
cariola
, and lifts plastic buckets full of the heavy mash with a cable reel.