The Old King in his Exile

by Stefan Tobler

  Family photos from the early fifties glowed on the white wall: Adolf and Theresia Geiger, surrounded by the nine children who still lived at home at that time, just a little before Emma, one of the three daughters, died of a ruptured appendix. It was astonishing how old the grandparents looked, even back then. They seemed to be about to enter their dotage, although my grandmother would go on to live another forty years, outwardly almost unchanged, a small worn-out woman with grey hair and deep lines in her face.

  Apart from one son, all the surviving members of the family had come – they were people from a different era, farm children who had sharpened their slate pencils on the cellar step because it was made of sandstone and was particularly good for whetting. Our odd clan had proven itself absurdly inventive and capable, with an imagination that had a practical rather than a visionary bent. Only Josef was missing. He was the only one who had pulled away from the family’s magnetic field. He emigrated to the United States in the late fifties and made his American Dream happen by inventing an electric can opener.

  I asked the brothers and sisters if one of them, by any chance, had a copy of the photo of my father taken soon after he was released from the POW camp. They all knew immediately which photo I meant, but simultaneously shook their now-grey heads. Maria, over eighty years old, said that it was different back then, when you couldn’t make as many copies of a photo as you wanted.

  Paul told us about his own homecoming and how he had been confronted with a devastating image. Not long before his return, a thunderstorm had blown through the orchard – trees were flat on the ground and weeds covered everything. Most men of working age were away because of the war, and the women had their hands full with the livestock and housework. Robert, who was nine when the war ended, said he had been working in the field when the storm took him by surprise, and that he had held on to a tree trunk while the hail beat down on his legs. The cartload of hay, which the children were rushing to bring inside, almost tipped over near the limekiln. And because the hail had destroyed the fruit, many of the trees started to flower in the autumn.

  My father had forgotten all of that; it no longer pained him. He had transformed memories into character, and his character remained. His formative experiences were still at work.

  *

  That year, like every summer, I spent some weeks at my parents’ house. I could feel that the distance that had grown between my father and me was now closing again, and that we weren’t losing touch, which is what I had long feared from the illness. Instead, there was an uncomplicated warmth between us, thanks to his forgetfulness, so that I almost welcomed this failing. All our conflicts were in the past. ‘An opportunity like this won’t come around again,’ I thought.

  My partner Katharina, who at the time lived in Innsbruck, came to spend a few days in Wolfurt. One day we persuaded my father to go for a walk with us. He came along reluctantly and kept wanting to turn back, although we hadn’t yet left the upper field. I was a little exasperated, because it was a beautiful evening and I would have liked to walk down to the river with him.

  When we turned into the lane by the house and the view down to Wolfurt unfolded in front of us, he was happy and praised the panorama.

  ‘Have you often walked here?’ he asked me. ‘Some people come just for the view.’

  That sounded odd to me, and I replied, ‘I don’t come here because of the view. I grew up here.’

  That seemed to surprise him. He made a face and muttered, ‘Oh, right.’

  So I asked, ‘Dad, do you know who I am?’

  The question seemed to embarrass him. He turned to Katharina and, waving vaguely in my direction, joked, ‘As if that were really so interesting.’

  ‌

  Dad, what was the happiest time of your life?

  When they were young.

  Who are you talking about? When who was young?

  Oh, my kids.

  ‌

  The undermining of religious and bourgeois conventions during the Nazi era led indirectly to these same conventions being held in exaggerated esteem after the war. Paul told me that the social landscape after the war was as bleak as the moon’s surface: piety, conservatism, a sense of decency, and nothing but work. For young people it was ghastly, he said.

  Given my father’s modest dreams, he couldn’t have found the situation quite so claustrophobic. He was more interested in avoiding pain than in seeking out happiness. Back in Wolfurt, he could live the life he believed was right and at the same time regain a sense of security and stability. He wanted no more surprises, which also meant no more opportunities. To be open to the opportunities the world offers you, you need trust, and trust – if my father had possessed it before the war – had been taken from him. Experience forms scar tissue.

  His need for a quiet life steered him to work for local government and to help in village associations. He was one of the founding members of the local football team and played as a winger. He led the amateur dramatics society and directed Nestroy’s Lumpazivagabundus. He sang in the church choir, which was mainly made up of women. But women were rather exotic objects to him and in them he showed no interest. For the post-war decade, there were no skirts in his life, except for his mother’s.

  Maybe he had no need to prove his masculinity, maybe he valued his independence. A kiss in those days meant something different to a girl than it does today.

  After a few years’ work as the fuel management specialist for Vorarlberg’s government, he became the clerk for Wolfurt in 1952 (or, in German, the Gemeindeschreiber, literally the ‘parish writer’), and indeed, until the mid-sixties, he had no secretary to help him. My father’s office was in a former classroom on the ground floor of the village school. It was an enormous space, much too big; the furniture was ancient and there were no curtains. In the summer he would sit there in his lederhosen and sandals, typing away, with two fingers pounding on the typewriter keys and the sound echoing around the large empty room. When he had the window open, his typing could be heard from the street, and people would say, ‘August’s clattering away again.’

  There was a teacher who came to Vorarlberg from the easternmost state of Burgenland. Her name was ‘Terusch’, and my father apparently liked her. But Dätt was against her for some reason or other, and my father followed his father’s will. The story is a little vague and I haven’t been able to verify anything; my father’s siblings know nothing about it and I can’t ask him myself.

  I do know that at that time, at the end of the fifties, my father started to build a house on the hillside above his parents’ orchard. Dätt had been happy to give him the land ‘because the grass doesn’t grow up there.’ From then on, my father spent his free hours on the building site. It wasn’t far from the church, and the leaden vibrations of the tolling bell would often ring through the air.

  In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison writes that according to an ancient strain in Western philosophy, you must know something before you can make it. If you want to build a house, you have to know what a house is before you start. My father sort of knew. He knew the basics. He planned everything himself, he made his own hollow bricks, he did the electrics himself, and did the plastering himself. He liked plastering, he said. He felt ‘at home’ with things like that.

  The new house stood above the orchard with the nobility of something freshly made and freshly whitewashed. To the left were the Swiss mountains and Appenzell, then Wolfurt and Bregenz straight ahead, and to the right the Gebhardsberg and the sheer cliffs of the Känzele. The view lent a special charm to the location. Many years later, when I asked my father why the house stood as it did, he replied that he hadn’t positioned it according to the sun, but the Gebhardsberg.

  *

  In 1963, at the age of thirty-seven, my father ended up marrying after all. He walked down the aisle with a young teacher from St Pölten, who – by his standards – hadn’t had a home. Her father, a locomotive stoker, fell in the war. She grew up in terr
ible poverty. Her mother worked in a children’s home in Ybbs and mended people’s clothing on the side. The daughter, after her mother remarried, was sent to stay with her grandfather in Vorarlberg, where she trained as a teacher. Her first posting was the old schoolhouse in Wolfurt.

  My mother had gone from the province to the depths of the province. And it was there she made a mistake, she would later tell me.

  Those short of sense when they marry pay dearly to acquire it later. Such a practical attitude to marriage was light years away from my parents’ approach. Because they hadn’t been shown by example in their childhood homes, their ideas were based largely on ignorance – and, as is so often the case, on failing to see that they couldn’t change the other person. Character is a harder currency than goodwill.

  Unsuited as they were for each other, they had made a spectacular mistake. I can’t put it any better than Tolstoy, who wrote in Anna Karenina that allowing young people to choose their spouse is about as sensible as suggesting that loaded pistols are an appropriate toy for five-year-olds, as the old princess says.

  Before the wedding, it didn’t occur to my parents to think what would happen when their two different ideas of happiness clashed. Both of them were capable of being happy, but examined more closely, it was clear that they had very different ways of reaching that happiness. In the end, they were each unhappy in their own way.

  Neither could meet the other’s expectations. They even communicated in essentially different ways. Their ages and backgrounds left an unbridgeable chasm between them: my father was from a large farming family, my mother from a single-parent, working-class home; he had been socialised in the pre-war years, she post-war; the war and imprisonment were formative for him, poverty and the Heimatfilm genre for her. Different expectations, different values, different emotional tones: he favoured the simple and bare, she favoured the sensual and warm; he was fond of company, she loved education. He often gave her proof that he wasn’t cut out for a more cultured life. She would tell us, ‘August fell asleep in the first act.’

  Their separate dreams created a perfect dissonance, excepting the wish to marry and have children. Apart from those shared goals, their daily life together resembled that of two people in the Tower of Babel, desperately insisting, each in their own language, ‘You don’t understand me!’

  When I asked my father why he had married my mother, he said that he had liked her a lot and wanted to give her a home. Here, too, his great themes were present: home, safety, security. They were what mattered to him. Being in love is nice, he might have thought, but knowing where you belong is nicer still.

  Meanwhile, my mother wasn’t looking for safety and security, but for stimulation. She was open to the world and hungry for what was new. There was no question of a honeymoon, because they had no money. But when my father refused to go on a walk and call it their honeymoon, my mother was flabbergasted. To my father, the only point of the world being so large and beautiful was so that everyone didn’t crowd into Wolfurt.

  ‘Not even a walk in the woods!’ my mother would often recount with indignation. His refusal was certainly not his finest hour. My father didn’t want his habits disturbed for a single day. Anything that broke the routine was unwelcome, even a little excursion on the Saturday afternoon after his wedding.

  His life plan: no winding lines, just straight ones.

  *

  Writing about a failed marriage seems a little like sweeping up cold ashes. For a time the two of them must have managed, by compromising, to negotiate some approximation of inner peace. They didn’t argue, and in spite of the tensions in their relationship, the birth of their children brought some equilibrium. As one baby followed another in quick succession, my mother was very happy, while my father’s efforts to be a good husband meant striving to do well in his role as a father – and he did. The happiness of having children was something my parents could share. But as a relationship based on love, the marriage was a hopeless failure. The utterly different nature of their feelings played one trick after another on them and they gradually became more intransigent in their attitudes. When two people have such completely opposed ways of thinking, at some point they will come to the conclusion that further debate and concessions have no point.

  Early in their marriage, life in the large house on the hill followed a more or less normal course. We looked like a normal family. We played our musical instruments for hours each day, and after lunch those children who could already hold cards would play canasta for half an hour with our parents. Before lunch, we children ran down to the church square to wait for our father, who came home from the office for two hours each afternoon. At that hour, the whole village seemed peaceful and friendly, with the smell of food wafting through the gardens and streets, because almost every household would sit down to eat at twelve on the dot. My father would put one of us children on his bike rack, one on the handlebars, all the rest of us would run alongside. On Saturday afternoons he took us with him to the football fields, and on Sundays we went on excursions. My father tended a vegetable patch with strawberries, too, and he also made lemon-balm cordial and elderberry juice. And when our mother said it was impossible to keep an eye on all four of her children at the lake, and that my father would have to go with them next time, he built a swimming pool. At first he had hatched a daring scheme to put the pool on the roof of the garage, connecting it to the balcony via a rope bridge. Such ideas were never lacking.

  In spite of the difference in my parents’ ages, my father made no pretence about being the head of the family. He was happy when he was left in peace. There was nothing strict about him. Yet he didn’t help with housework, although his wife was soon working again. He firmly believed that there was man’s work and woman’s work, ordained by right and by God. Tidying up was for women, except in the garden; hammering was for men, except when preparing schnitzel.

  The house was always a construction site, with no end to the extensions and renovations. My father never stopped thinking about possible improvements to the house or garden. In this respect, you could ask anything of him. Another bedroom? It couldn’t hurt. And so we would have more room inside and he would have something else to plaster.

  Driven by her longing for ‘the world’, my mother started to rent out rooms in the summer. She preferred German and Dutch travellers who were looking for a handy spot halfway between Lake Constance and the Bregenz Forest. After my father had converted the attic into a bedroom, they took in lodgers all year round – my mother’s teaching colleagues and young people who didn’t expect anything too fancy.

  In 1977 ‘the world’ really did come to my mother. We had a lodger from Germany whose surname was Pech – which in German means ‘bad luck’, but also the tarry waterproofing substance ‘pitch’. And the name fit: he had dark hair and liked to wear black. No one knew exactly what his job was, but he was warm-hearted and nice, and bought Ovaltine, which we children ate straight from the tin. When we were supposed to bring old magazines to the church youth group and everyone else came with the weekly television guides and church newspapers, I once took copies of Stern and Der Spiegel that Pech would regularly throw on the recycling pile under the stairs – and was immediately sent home with ‘that stuff’. One evening Pech came down from the attic and said he had to leave, that he didn’t have money to pay his last instalment of rent, but he’d leave his radio and hotplate. My father agreed, and the lodger moved out. A few days later, the police knocked on the door and asked after Pech, who was suspected of being a member of the militant Red Army Faction (RAF). We told them he’d gone.

  At the same time the hosiery and lingerie manufacturer Walter Palmers was kidnapped by members of the militant 2 June Movement – and it was a Vorarlberger who had made the ransom demands over the telephone, clear from his accent. In an attempt to identify him, the newspaper printed a number you could call to hear the man’s voice. I was nine at the time and secretly dialled the number several times. I found his words spo
oky and funny, although I had no idea what they meant. When it turned out that the Vorarlberger was a young man from Wolfurt, the general consternation reached its height. My mother had taught him at school, she told us, and he had been a very nice quiet boy, she had liked him.

  We didn’t hear from Pech for many years. We children were pleased to have harboured a wanted terrorist and to have eaten up his Ovaltine. We thought Wolfurt was the secret centre of the RAF. And then one day, Pech was there on our doorstep, just dropping by. We felt a little awkward as our father told him about the police investigation, but Pech waved it away. They had found him quickly and just as quickly let him go again – all part of the hysteria of 1977.

  Our father was visibly relieved, and I, a little disappointed.

  My childhood was reaching its end. My father had been a good and happy father until then – the time when he should have taken more initiative. He wasn’t comfortable with adolescents, which is common enough among parents. He should have been trying to interest his children in new things, but it wasn’t in his nature to reach out to people. He preferred to withdraw and settle deeper into the old habits of his village life. The words ‘habit’ and ‘inhabit’ are related, of course.

  When the phone rang, our father didn’t make a move to get it. He couldn’t imagine that anyone would want anything of him.

  ‘Won’t be for me,’ he would say.

  Nor did he wait for the postman. Why would he? The postman never brought him anything worth looking forward to.