Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  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!

  THE 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.

  Since the whine of circular saws has replaced the mixer’s chewing and, in the woodshed, bags of cement have been replaced by beams, posts, and planking, I can sense Grandmother giving in. Just as the builders are topping off the house with a spruce tree attached to the highest rafter, she decides not to move into the new house. She threatens to tell everyone who asks that she was thrown out.

  A few weeks before we move in, the fabric
merchant comes by.

  Grandmother haggles over blankets, towels, pillows, and sheets – her contribution to the household, she says.

  The Gypsy’s van is filled to the brim with bed linens when he brings the ordered goods. He assures us he chose the best pieces for his best customer.

  His wife can’t read the cards fast enough because the construction workers are also hoping to be told of good fortunes. The piles of sheets and towels flaunt their white, blue, and golden-red flower patterns on the balcony of the outbuilding and are admired by the recipients for days.

  The new house is furnished and occupied.

  One evening I hear Father arguing with Michi, who had stopped in to ask how things were coming along. Michi thinks that Father shouldn’t have cut costs and installed central heating. It’s standard these days and is less time-consuming than heating with a small oven. Besides, Michi thinks a new house without warm water is old-fashioned. Father takes offense. He didn’t want to go into debt, he protests. Furthermore, now there’s running water in the house, so he can forego the luxury of central heating. As he is taken around the house, Michi does find a few things he likes, especially the bathroom and the new bread oven that has been covered with antique tiles.

  Mother puts a set of dishes in mint condition into the sideboard, the set she received on her wedding day. She sews curtains and tablecloths for the kitchen and embroiders them with red carnations. She argues with Father over the wooden closet she ordered from the carpenter to keep her books and knitting supplies along with our schoolbooks. Grandmother moves into the outbuilding, and I move into a room of my own with no heating.

  The new house is built on a vulnerable foundation. The slope, into which the old house seemed to have grown, has been removed. Where once a path led so close to the back of the house that you could support yourself with your hand on the wall, there is now an escarpment. Like an open mouth from which the jaws were extracted. The new house stands in this gaping mouth with no rear cover and cannot settle down. The badly insulated walls cannot store any heat. The first blotches and traces of mold appear in the stairwell. The old cellar revives memories of the past every time we set foot in it. When the seasons change, it emits strange odors that try to penetrate into the building above it. The new walls, however, send everything outside, eject all they cannot hold. Waves of odors waft around the courtyard, the musty smell of mold, the sour smell of apples, the sweetish smell of potatoes.

  I’M delighted I can return to the castle in my summer holidays. In Gradisch, I hop up the wooden staircase to my uncle’s apartment and plunge into the familiar mix of smells in the attic apartment. I want to play for hours with my cousins or lie in bed reading comic books.

  The summer days have a glittering golden border and more of the color rubs off onto my skin every day. The days are painted with the colors of the flowers in my aunt’s garden and blended in the water of the count’s pond where we swim.

  One hot day at noon, Iris, who works in the kitchen, takes Johanna and me to the pond. She is meant to keep an eye on us. In any case, she is older than we are.

  We spread our towels on the dock and cautiously slip into the shallow water. Iris lets my little cousin climb onto her back and swims across the pond with her. Johanna squeals and laughs, but the pond’s depths are quickly crossed.

  After Iris set Johanna on the dock again, she offers to take me on her back. I hesitate because I can’t swim, but finally picture myself flying across on Iris’s back and I slip into the dark water. In the middle of the pond, Iris suddenly goes limp under me then digs her nails into my shoulders. We sink immediately, tenaciously gripping each other, trying again and again to surface. Iris holds me underwater but her grip grows weaker and when I pull myself up on her and scream for help, I don’t hear a sound from her, not a scream or a groan, I just feel her yielding and I manage to tear myself away. I push off from her and swim, or at least move in a way that resembles swimming, the water around me a gelatinous mass. There’s thudding in my blocked ears. The idea of surviving makes me feel light-headed, she could kill me, I have to swim, I tell myself until I feel the earth under my feet again and can stand. Johanna laughs. I gasp for air, turn, and see Iris floating, curled up, on the surface of the water. I scream for help and run to the castle, I call the workers, they rush down to the pond and pull Iris from the water. Her striped bikini top slips from her shoulders and bares one white breast, a thick light-colored substance gushes from her mouth. It’s what she ate for lunch, says someone who is trying to revive her. The substance is orange now. She drowned, someone says. I killed her, I think. My aunt pulls Johanna and me away. I turn as we leave and see Iris, pale, so white and pale, lying on the sandy ground. I killed her, I think. A doctor arrives and says I shouldn’t see more.

  Later, the police arrive, too, and want to question me. But I can’t speak German, I think, I can’t tell them I killed her. So I tell a story, I say we were playing, that she sank underwater out of the blue, that I was able to get free from her, somehow or other. I run a fever, wake up screaming in the middle of the night, I’m galloping away on a flaming black horse.

  The looks people give me over the following days are sad and wordless. They stick to the surface of my body that, like a snail’s shell, is separated from my raw and tender interior, as if my skin were recoiling from the inflammation beneath it. I have landed in Death’s quiver and have heard his breath, felt his maw. Death almost caught me. I’d barely escaped into life, into my scarcely eight-year-old life that had just taken its place inside me and refused to be chased away like a thief. Despite my bewilderment, I feel guilty for having survived.

  When I’m brought home, my aunt says that they almost lost me, that I very nearly drowned, she can hardly forgive herself. Mother says, that’s terrible. She says nothing else. I take a step to the side, invisible to everyone there, and watch myself standing on the front doorstep, crying. Am I really crying or am I only thinking of crying? The person that I’m watching or that I am would never be able to express how distraught she is. Grandmother puts her arm around me and says, sleep with me tonight, tonight you can sleep with me! At night, I press up against her so hard that, half-asleep, she scolds me. I hold her tight, as if her bony body were lying next to me like an island in the vast ocean.

  WE are standing in the entrance to the old cellar when I try to recount how the disaster happened. I tell Grandmother a story that sounds strange and dull. The only thing I feel with any certainty is that Iris’s death is overwhelming, that I can neither bear nor understand what happened, and that I’m afraid of the police. I thought they were going to lock me up, I manage to squeeze out.

  Grandmother takes my hand. I’ll show you how to act when the police come, she says. With your tongue, you have to make the sign of the cross on the roof of your mouth. You have to make three crosses and repeat that a few times. You see, she says and opens her mouth to show her tongue making a crossing motion on the top of her mouth. In this way, silently, invisibly, she prayed on the day the police took her away and she had to say goodbye to her oldest son and her nephew who were in the house at the time. I crossed myself with my tongue and with my foot, I drew crosses on the ground, Grandmother tells me. You have to pray for a safe return and convince all the powers that be that you want to go home. On the 12th of October in 1943, many of the neighbors who had been arrested with her died, Marija Mozgan, the Mozgan’s maid, Bricl, Luka Čemer, Miha Kožel, Poldi Topičnik, the men in the Kach family, Jurij, Hanzi, and Franz, the Kach women, Marija and Ana, they all died in the camp. The only ones who came back were the Mozgdan’s daughter Amalija, the Čemer children, Johi and Katrca, Tschik and the Auprich boys, Erni and Franz, Paula Maloveršnik, and Grandmother herself. They were all that was left of the procession led away towards Eisenkappel that day. I also prayed silently during each roll call in the camp, Grandmother says. Once, in the first winter, they had to stand late into the night on Christmas, it was snowing, the women had to endure the cold in
their light work coats. One woman was missing, no one knew if she’d escaped or died. They had to stand until the prisoner count tallied. The snow stuck to the women. We were so frozen the snow didn’t even melt, but piled up on our thin coats, Grandmother says. Late into the night, she constantly repeated her prayers and made the sign of the cross with her tongue so she wouldn’t collapse. She was saved, yes, but whether or not she’s glad she’s alive, that she can’t say.

  I slowly begin to emerge from my torpor and realize there are disasters much greater than mine. I should stick to Grandmother, I think, since she knows Death, because once you’ve smelled Death, you can chase him away, scare him off, as soon as you feel him approaching. I’m not reassured, just admonished and distracted, spilled like a glass of water that can’t be put back in the receptacle, that has changed and evaporated where it was spilled.

  THE colors of summer slowly return. They flicker in the sunlit trees and float up from the sun-warmed meadows as we cross them. The hay harvest sets the rhythm to our days and I bury my horror in a remote corner of my consciousness. Despite the heat, an icy shadow flits through me from time to time and envelops me in its darkness.