He didn’t respond when I said hello. I said it again, but his eyes didn’t flicker. No reaction at all. I checked to see if he was still breathing. His chest rose and fell, but that didn’t stop my heart rate from shooting up. It seemed my voice wasn’t reaching him, although I was talking more and more loudly. I thought he must have had a stroke or something like that. But the tenth or eleventh time I said something, he gave a nervous start and looked at me in confusion, as if he couldn’t figure out how I had suddenly appeared at his bedside. I asked him, somewhat frantically, how he was. He shrugged and said, ‘Good, I hope.’
*
It’s said that every story is a rehearsal for death, because every story must arrive at an end. At the same time, by devoting attention to what has gone, storytelling brings back lost things.
Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
*
Afterwards I sat on a chair and looked out at Lauteracher Strasse, where a car occasionally drove past. Now and then I asked my father if he wanted to go out. He didn’t. I tried to make it sound enticing, but couldn’t interest him.
‘You don’t want to go outside with me, Dad? We could go for a little walk.’
‘Where to?’ he asked.
‘Out into the garden.’
‘Not interested.’
‘To Wolfurt, Dad.’
He looked at me, nodded, and said, as if to prove that he still knew what he loved best, ‘Well, that’s a different matter, of course.’
He stood up and went to the door. I took his arm, relieved that he was still alive.
*
The further you travel from your origins, the longer you feel you have lived. Were we to measure my father’s life in that way, we would say he had a short life until the war, then for a short time he had a long life, and then for a very long time a short life, which only in his dementia once again became long.
*
Another resident in the home shuffled along behind us and asked if the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, ‘The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats’, could be about infanticide. I replied that he was probably right and that I’d think about it.
As we walked away, my father looked at the man as if he had never seen him before, then promptly forgot him again.
*
My father would say his fellow residents of the home were ‘poor fellows, whose willpower shouldn’t be measured by their results.’ Sometimes he called them ‘layabouts’ – not excluding himself. He felt good among people like him. ‘There are other good-for-nothing layabouts here. I’ve rounded up quite a crowd.’
Another time he said, with obvious sympathy, ‘We’ve all been patched up.’
*
If I were to compare my father to a literary figure, I would chose Levin, the main male character in Anna Karenina – but not just because Leo Tolstoy describes him cutting a meadow with a scythe. What really links the two of them is their wish to improve things. Even today, my father will look around the home’s garden and say, ‘There are things that could be improved. I can see that with my naked eye. What they’ve done here looks a bit odd to me. I don’t see the point of doing it like this. I don’t follow.’
He was often preoccupied with far-reaching plans, declaring, ‘I’ve got plenty of ideas, but they don’t come out any more.’
*
I remember how he used to wear baggy trousers and stand under a sunshade to plaster the outer garage walls. Our neighbours, meanwhile, dozed under their sunshade. My father would tie knots in the four corners of a handkerchief and put it on his head, to protect himself from the sun.
*
‘And what are they?!’
‘They’re trees, Dad.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘They don’t give the impression of being trees.’
*
Now we sat on a bench in the garden and he was showing great interest in the notes I was making in an old notebook. He held my book so that it wouldn’t slip as I wrote, and asked me, ‘How have you fared with your papers?’
‘I’ve always fared well with my papers,’ I replied.
‘Me, too,’ he said.
*
It’s a strange situation. Everything I give him, he can’t hold onto. Everything he gives me, I hold onto with all my strength.
*
Such hours seem to go on forever. I have time to notice so much. Barely anything escapes my attention. I’m lucid, fully there, everything streams into me so clearly. It’s as if I’m bathed in a strong light.
*
My father kept an eye on me as I wrote, as if he wanted to say, ‘Sit still, son – you have to do your homework!’
*
There’s something between the two of us that has led me to open myself more to the world. Which is, of course, the opposite of what people normally say that Alzheimer’s does – that it cuts connections. Sometimes it creates them.
*
When our hopes and dreams were dashed, that’s when our lives began.
*
Happiness, as death approaches, takes on real weight. Just when we hadn’t expected it.
*
To be like General de Gaulle who, when asked how he wished to die, replied, ‘Living!’
*
I was barely nineteen when one Saturday afternoon I visited Aunt Berti, Paul’s first wife, who wanted to say her goodbyes to her many nephews and nieces. A priest was just leaving the house. She told me that he’d wished her a quick recovery and how ridiculous it was to say that to someone on their deathbed. She looked disappointed and upset. This short moment made a deep impression on me: a dying woman, the mother of three children, two of them still teenagers, demanded in the face of death that no one close their eyes to the facts. I’ve never quite got over her words.
Sometimes you learn more in a moment than in a whole year at school.
*
That was also the period when we heard the sad news of the suicides of Joe, Maria and Irmi, three of my father’s godchildren. It was hard for us to understand those deaths that came out of nowhere, apparently at random, and they haven’t stopped weighing on our family since.
When I mentioned them to my father, he didn’t remember.
‘No, I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.
On the other hand, his mother, who also died around that time, is now alive again, at least in his mind. ‘I have to get home, Mum’s waiting for me!’
*
For millennia, fate was an elemental force. Today people frown upon talk of fate. Everything has to have an explanation. But at times, things happen to us that we can’t prevent or explain. It affects this person and not that one, apparently without rhyme or reason. Why? This remains a mystery.
*
The longing for the years already lived and for the people who have left us behind.
*
One day, my father will draw the breath that isn’t followed by another breath. I get angry about all this effort – for what? Then I think there’s something in what Julien Green wrote in his diary at the age of eighty: that he didn’t mind losing his abilities and dying; God would take the sponge and erase what was written on the slate, in order to once again write His own name on it.
Unlike my father, I’m not very religious. But I can find a secular pleasure in what Julien Green wrote of this Other One writing his name on the slate. Others will frequent places we now frequent. Others will drive down the streets we now drive down. Others will live where my father built a house. Someone will take up the stories I told.
As absurd and sad as this arrangement is, it feels right to me.
*
I read in the newspaper that cockroaches survived atomic tests on the Bikini Atoll and that they will outlive humanity. One more thing that will outlive me. I’m fine with wine and women living longer than me, but that cockroaches will still be here when I’ve made my exit… That stings.
*
Once I was fetching a bottle of wine from the cellar
and, as the window by the ceiling was open, I could hear my father talking outside. He sat on the little wall with Daniela and said, ‘Maybe the time is coming…’
*
If people were immortal, they would think less about things. And if they thought less, life wouldn’t be as beautiful.
Without the absurdity of life and the existence of death, neither The Magic Flute nor Romeo and Juliet would have been written. Why would anyone have bothered?
*
Death is one of the reasons why life appeals so much to me. It forces me to see the world more clearly.
But, to me, since death is an unavoidable reality, indignation about it seems like mere barking at the moon – given how insistently life muscles in.
*
Time will go on, in spite of all protests.
*
I think it’s in the film The Lady from Shanghai that I heard this little dialogue:
‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Me neither. And if I do, then I want to die last.’
*
However much people cling to life, when they believe that someone else’s quality of life is inadequate, they suddenly decide death can’t come soon enough. That’s when relatives start to talk about assisted suicide, though they would be better off considering their own inability to deal with the new situation. Is such talk really about freeing the sick person from the disease, or is it about freeing oneself from a sense of helplessness?
*
Guilty for still being alive.
*
I’m never prepared for the moments when my father, with a gentleness I never used to notice in him, puts his hand on my cheek – sometimes his palm, often the back of his hand. Then I realise that I’ll never be closer to him than I am in that moment.
*
I’ll always remember it. Always. Always! Or at least for as long as I can.
*
I put my arm around him and said, ‘Well, you old warhorse?’
‘Me?’ he asked in surprise.
‘Aren’t you an old warhorse?’
‘That depends what you mean. An old warhorse is strong…’ He looked closely at me, smiling, and added, ‘You’re one of those people who always liked a lot of things and absolutely loathed a lot of things, too.’
‘Some things I really loved,’ I said.
‘You always loved adventure. I didn’t.’
‘What did you love?’
‘Going home.’
*
Another time, when I took his hand and squeezed it, he asked me, ‘Why are you doing that?’
‘Just because,’ I said.
He looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and irritation, before replying, ‘Of course, you can hold my hand whenever you want. But I do wonder why you’re doing it.’
‘I’m doing it because I love you,’ I said.
The explanation embarrassed him. When he replied, his tone expressed the sense he had that he was no longer good for anything. ‘You’re just saying that.’
Thrown, I could only mumble, unconvincingly, ‘Of course I love you.’
My father’s head sank and he dropped the topic.
*
When I ask myself what my father is like, at first he fits easily into a type. Then he once again splinters into the many shapes that he took on over the course of his life, for myself and others.
*
What a bottomless ability to be cheerful he has, to laugh and to strike up friendships.
Coming home from the war, my father’s talent for arousing people’s sympathy was invaluable. The names of all those who helped him in his time of need are carefully noted in the pages he wrote about his experiences. The ferry across the Danube near St Valentin was paid for by a certain Alfons Mayr from the town of Ried im Innkreis. Ewald Fischer and Guido Orsinger gave him a loaf of bread in Urfahr. One man forged his Delousing Certificate, so he could hide under the seat of the Red Cross vehicle – a Siegfried Nosko from Dornbirn. One man shared his double ration of food – the music teacher Franz Gruber from Bregenz, who played dance music for the Americans.
*
Almost all of us founder on the ideas we’ve formed of our fathers. Scarcely any man manages to live up to the image that his children have of him.
*
What could he tell me of the illness, if he were to return from it, like Rip Van Winkle coming back from that twenty-year-long bowling night? We would be able to talk to each other differently, more openly, more freely, more intelligently.
It’s becoming apparent that in some way his children will come out of these events purged.
*
It is clearly leaving a deep mark on each of us.
*
After many years of living on her own after the separation, his wife has forgiven him for their unhappy marriage. His deep wish for a lifelong relationship finds a kind of fulfilment.
A few days ago, he was back at home, in his house, sitting still on a chair in his kitchen while my mother cut his hair.
*
Particularly in families and couples, you come across feelings that over a lifetime twist around and around, coiling like corkscrews.
*
In the poor man robbed of his senses, I often see my father as he once was. When he smiles at me, clear-eyed, which still happens a lot, thank goodness, I know that my visit was worthwhile for him, too.
It’s as if he doesn’t know anything but understands everything.
*
Once, when I gave him my hand, he said how sorry he was that it was cold. I told him that I’d just been out in the rain. He held my hand between his two and said, ‘Do whatever you need to be doing, but right now, I’m going to warm this hand.’
*
Afterwards we went to sit on the sofa. Once we had decided who would sit where, he said, ‘I’m an old boy now. I don’t like complicated things.’
Mozart was playing quietly over the speakers. Whenever someone went past, my father would exclaim ‘Hallelujah!’ and follow the person with his eyes. The fifth time he shouted ‘Hallelujah!’ the person laughed. My father remarked to Katharina and me with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Goes down a treat.’
*
This old man with his small-scale longings that mean more to him than a home in paradise: to go for walks and meet someone with whom he can chat a little.
*
Expectations are modest in the old people’s home: little comforts, smiling faces, roaming cats, a joke that works. I like the fact that the people who live here are free from a society that judges people by their performance.
A lack of opportunity is sometimes freeing. In my mind, it’s like waiting at a little train station in Siberia, miles from the next village. You sit there and crack sunflower seeds. A train will come sometime. Something will happen sometime. It must.
*
My father took a sip of coffee and put the cup down next to its saucer. He looked at them and said, ‘Are they related?’
‘Yes, they belong together,’ I replied.
‘I thought so. Because of their colour,’ he said.
*
The newspaper says that black sheep are becoming rarer because of global warming.
*
My fear that the best times are now over has been proven baseless time and again. Whatever I thought I saw coming, it seldom occurred. ‘You’re way off there,’ my father would have said in his level-headed way. So I no longer face the future with such trepidation.
*
Ready for whatever comes.
*
With this book, I wanted to take my time. I saved up for six years. At the same time, I wanted to write it before my father died. I didn’t want to tell his story after his death. I wanted to write about a living person. I felt that my father, like everyone else, deserved to have an open-ended destiny.
*
As I write these sentences, I’m almost exactly half his age. It’s taken a long time to get here. It’s taken a l
ong time to find out something about the fundamental things that have made my father and I the people we are.
*
‘I used to be a strong lad,’ my father said to Katharina and me. ‘Not little kid-goats like you two!’
*
It’s said that whoever waits long enough can become king.
About the Author and Translator
ARNO GEIGER grew up in the Austrian Alps, in a village overlooking Lake Constance. His grandparents were farmers, his father was the local government clerk and his mother a primary school teacher. He studied German and comparative literature at university and his debut novel appeared in 1997. In 2005, he was awarded the inaugural German Book Prize. First published in 2011, his autobiographical The Old King in His Exile has now, with this translation into English, been translated into 28 languages. The memoir has won literary prizes, including the 2011 Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, as well as prizes from medical societies in various countries, including the 2011 German Hospice and Palliative Care Association (DHPV) Award. He is married and lives in Vienna.
STEFAN TOBLER was born in the Amazon to an English mother and a Swiss father. He is the publisher at And Other Stories and a literary translator from Portuguese and German. Apart from The Old King in His Exile, his recent translations include Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (shortlisted for the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize) and Raduan Nassar’s A Cup of Rage (longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize).
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The Old King in his Exile Page 11