Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  I picture a procession of people following Father’s coffin, the mourners beating their hands against their chests with remorse and gathering around the open grave, their heads hanging low. I agree with Father and have to work hard to keep from giving way to tears because I think I can also make out a tone of mockery and rancor in his words.

  My uneasiness grows when Father goes to the tavern on Sunday afternoons. As soon as evening has fallen and I can hear him swearing behind the stable on his return, I sit by the living room window, from which I can see the stable and, more importantly, the ramp to the threshing barn. Mother asks me to watch how long Father stays in the barn. If he isn’t back in half an hour, someone will have to go check on him. With its beams and rafters, the threshing barn is a place that gives people ideas, Mother says.

  I’m sure I once heard Father threaten Mother that he would hang himself in the barn after she took away the cartridges for his rifle. As a hunter, he has a right to his cartridges, and it’s downright indecent for her to have taken them. There isn’t a single woman in Lepena who would dare take away her husband’s bullets.

  As soon as Father has staggered up the wooden ramp to the threshing barn, racing thoughts set my body on fire, the fever spikes, and I start to melt like beeswax put too near the flame. Father usually comes down again, but a few times we wait for him in vain. We hurry into the barn with bated breath and find him asleep in the hay.

  One Monday morning, as I am checking my schoolbag before going to school, Father comes into the sitting room and sits on the bench near the oven. In his hand, he is holding a calving rope and he sighs. This time I don’t hold back my tears and I sit down next to him. He looks at me, astonished as if he only just grasped what I thought I’d understood. But my girl, he says, you don’t need to cry! I only thought about doing it, and when I wanted to do it, when I put the noose around my neck, I could feel something holding me back, a kind of angel, you see. I thought I saw someone. I can’t do it, that’s one thing you need to know! I can’t bring myself to do it, Father says.

  Mother is suddenly standing before us and she starts screaming at Father, does he realize what he’s doing to the child, does he have any idea that I immediately get a fever when he gets up to his stupid tricks, he should just stop terrorizing the children, she screams, he should finally get a grip on himself! Well, the girl, at least, loves me, which no one can say about you, Father taunts Mother. Besides, he’s planning on moving in with his brother.

  At that moment, the despair bottled up inside me comes flooding out. I wail and beg him not to go, he has to stay with us. I cling to him tightly, I will hold on until he finally understands that he can’t sneak out of our lives.

  She’s about to faint, Mother says, I’ve never seen her like this, the child is out of her senses, she tells him I have to be put to bed, I can’t go to school in such a state. Now Father can see what he’s done, he’s scared the child out of her wits.

  They carry me to bed, and I toss and turn under the sheets. Mother holds my hand, she sits at my bedside as she has never done before. She brings me warm milk and apple compote, she’ll even bring me red currants from the cellar storeroom if I’d like. I have to calm down, she says. She tells me I should pray, if I prayed properly, God would put everything right, she believes. I don’t.

  For the next week, Father can hardly sleep. Through the long nights he sways his upper body and aching head back and forth. He moans and groans, his headache is like a purgatorial fire, he has no idea how he could have earned such pain, he can’t imagine why God would punish him with a headache like this.

  One evening, Grandmother has him stand in the doorway to the house and toss cooled embers over his head behind him, one piece of coal for each stab of pain.

  Throw your pain behind you, without looking back, hold your breath, say a prayer! You have to believe, Grandmother says. You have to call the saints because to hear is to obey. Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Souriel, Zaziel, Badakiel! Flee illness, a god is chasing you out! Flee illness, a god is chasing you out!

  OUT of exhaustion, I begin to withdraw from my sentient body. I wonder why no one has thought of casting a protective spell for me, too, a spell that would shield me from excessive danger. I wonder why they all forget to cover me with defensive words that will preserve me from this reality that makes me shudder at every new occurrence. I could grab any hand, could press myself against any tree or animal I pass. I speak with the calves and let loose on the imperturbable cows when I drive them off the field and into the barn.

  Grandmother keeps making signs to come near her, she wants to tell me something. She asks me if I’d like to sleep in the outbuilding with her, I could share her bed. I do want to! But only if your mother doesn’t object, Grandmother says with a slight, triumphant trembling in her voice, you have to ask her first, of course.

  Sometimes I ask Mother before even speaking to Grandmother. I just invite myself to Grandmother’s room. I don’t want to be alone.

  Grandmother’s bedroom is a site of memory, a queen bee’s cell, in which everything seems bathed in a milky liquid, a breeding cell, in which I’m fed with Grandmother’s nutrient juices. It is in this nucleus, I realize only years later, that I will be formed. Grandmother guides my sense of orientation. From then on there will be no passing by her markers. My senses will project Grandmother’s vibrations onto this world and will perceive the possibility of destruction everywhere. They will wait for fateful coincidences, for moments in which change is possible, because one must hope and prepare for salvation, yet without good fortune, everything falls apart.

  From the moment Grandmother decides to bring me into the two years of her life that marked her most profoundly, the pamphlets she brought back from the commemoration ceremony in Ravensbrück, The Women of Ravensbrück and What does it have to do with me?, lie on her night table next to the arnica tincture and the bitter mugwort liqueur. Occasionally Grandmother hands me a pamphlet and asks me to read out loud to her from it. I sit down at the old kitchen table and read: In Ravensbrück there were the Lagerkommandanten (camp commanders), the Schutzhaftlagerführer (preventive detention camp leader), the Verwaltungsführer (head of administration), the Arbeitsdienstführer (head of work details), the Gestapo officers in the political department, the camp doctors, the SS nurses, the Oberaufseherin (senior camp guard), the Aufseherinnen (camp guards), the SS Wachmannschaften (security guard details).

  Give it to me, Grandmother says and pulls the book impatiently from my hands, I’ll show you the guards. She leafs through the book and shows me a group of women sitting in dock in a courtroom. She points at a young, blonde woman. She was the worst, Grandmother says. She had a dog that she set on prisoners when they collapsed during roll call. Grandmother can still see the bloodhound, how it pulls at the leash before crouching to leap onto an exhausted woman. A Polish woman from her block was bitten by that dog. She had real holes in her legs. A Polish doctor ordered the wounds washed in urine, it helped, they didn’t have anything else, no bandages, nothing at all.

  It was this guard, Grandmother says, laying her index finger on the woman’s face, which disappeared beneath it. She was very young and very evil, very depraved. Good Lord, what people won’t do, Grandmother exclaims and spits on the photograph. Then she wipes the pages with her sleeve so they won’t stick together.

  Sometimes she spits at the photograph of the SS camp doctor as a substitute for the SS doctors she came across when she was brought into the infirmary. The things these doctors did to the women, čudno, čudno, Grandmother says and, again, means terrible when she says strange.

  She believes that, because of these books, no one will be able to accuse her of making up stories anymore. No one can call me a liar anymore, she says.

  Every now and then she takes a stained red notebook out of the table drawer. My camp diary, she says and opens the notebook, look, on the inside cover I wrote knjiga od zapora Maria H., the prison book of Maria H. A fellow prisoner gave her the not
ebook on the way home. That prisoner had been given the notebook by a French woman. She tore out a few pages. But look, Grandmother says, in Prenzlau, I started to make notes. On April 28th, they drove us out of the camp, the trip was amazing, she reads out loud, čudovita, because once again she can’t think of the Slovenian word for terrible. The SS forced them north along the front or in circles, she recounts. No one knew where they were heading. She can barely remember the first days because she was so weak, Gregorička had to carry her. One time, she can still remember they were marching through a forest that just would not end, the bodies of the dead and the exhausted were lying everywhere, along with gutted cars and munitions. Gregorička got hold of a wheelbarrow, put her in, and pushed it. Then the 1st of May came and the SS disappeared, they vanished on the spot. Thunder and gunfire all around them. The women wandered along the battle lines in groups. Her group spent the night in a pigsty. The Russians were going to shoot at the sty. Only when a woman in a striped camp uniform came out did the Russians realize concentration camp prisoners were in there. Then they slaughtered a pig for everyone to eat.

  They moved on the next day, devastation everywhere, villages bombed out, the planes flew very low over them. They searched for food and clothing in the abandoned houses. A woman from Ljubljana led her group, they stayed with her because the Slovenians were supposed to be taken home as a group. The Slovenians waited until the middle of August to go home. The Austrians wanted to struggle home as soon as the fighting had stopped, Grandmother says.

  As soon as Grandmother starts undressing, I do the same.

  She sits on the bed in her undershirt and undoes her thin braid, which she wears wound into a bun on the back of her head. I kneel on the bed behind Grandmother and start combing her hair. Her thin, gray hair falls between her shoulder blades. She alternately lays her left or her right hand on the side of her head I am combing. Careful, she says, careful, and sometimes after a sigh she continues, it was the 13th of November, the day she arrived at the camp. The women who were marched there with her through Fürstenberg had to get undressed after they were admitted. There was an air-raid alarm in the very first hours. They had to wait, naked, for two hours until they were examined. Then their heads were shaved. As soon as she says shaved, she pushes my hand away as if I were touching her hair without permission. With a few quick flicks of her hands, she weaves a braid and winds it back into a bun. She sighs. She had to lie on a table, she says, and they injected something into her vagina and it burned beyond belief and that was probably due to women’s trouble. One woman had just gotten her period and it all ran down her legs. The uniformed men looked at her like she was a cow, she was one of the older ones. The younger ones had problems because of their looks, they were taken from block twelve, where they were locked up for four weeks and brought back completely destroyed. Every day, morning and evening, they had to stand through two-hour roll calls, complete confusion, tears, it took a long time until they were all counted, and the disparaging looks measuring what you were still worth and what kind of work you could do.

  I catch myself scanning Grandmother for the looks that appraised her. I see strangers’ eyes covering her like a net and wonder if traces of horror were left on her skin. But there is no sign of the terror. It leaves no visible scars. Grandmother’s body is as angular as a skeleton, her horizontal collarbone, her shoulders, the protrusion of her lower cervical spine, her rib cage, her upper arm bones, over which her skin stretches like light gauze. She has no muscles anymore and no chest, look, she says, lifting her undershirt, my chest is a big wrinkle. I look reluctantly, but Grandmother purses her lips and says I shouldn’t shudder at the sight of old women. She’s seen a lot of naked women in her life and once you have, you stop being prim. She’s seen women in every possible condition, good Lord, she says, young and old, frail and beaten down, women with their skin hanging off them in tatters, dead women with skin like paper, like yellowish paper you could peel off their bones, she says. In the beginning she had to clean the latrines, you can’t imagine how it stank. The smell stuck to her, she couldn’t wash it off. Angela Piskernik, the professor from Eisenkappel, complained about the stink, but what was she supposed to do. Dirt is dirt and shit is shit, Grandmother says.

  She rubs her hands along her thighs, which are covered with cotton underwear to her knees, and tries to straighten her back by pressing against her legs. She asks me to pull her woolen tights off. The garters leave marks on her lower legs. Grandmother says her legs swell badly since the camp. It all started in the camp, the heaviness and swelling in her legs, with such pain in her joints and bones that she could barely stand at times. She asks if I want to see her throbbing big toe. I bend over her feet.

  Her big toenails look like barley sugar, I say and Grandmother laughs at the comparison. Like candy, she says, pleased, I didn’t know I have barley sugar on my feet! The skin below her knees has a bluish tinge, the capillaries hover over her calves and shins like webbing and cover her feet in a thicket that looks like a river delta.

  Should we eat a few cookies before we lie down, Grandmother asks after a pause.

  I nod and she gets a tin of wafers out of the kitchen sideboard. She prefers the crumbly ones that fall apart in your mouth right away, she says and unwraps her false teeth from the handkerchief she always keeps on her night table. Grandmother only uses her dentures to eat. She decided not to wear her dentures anymore once Grandfather died, why bother, she asks, she’s not going to get another man anyway. She keeps them in reach and often has them in her apron pocket. Most of the time, her false teeth feel superfluous, she claims.

  When I’m stretched out on the bed and she sits near me, telling me about the camp, she likes to talk about her foster daughter, Mici. Oh, she sighs, oh, if you only knew how my Mici looked when I saw her in the roll-call square! Mici threw her arms around me, Grandmother says, she cried Mother, Mother what are you doing here! I couldn’t hold back my tears, Grandmother says, it made me so sad! Mici told her that on the day she left the house to register with the police in Eisenkappel because she’d been summoned, she stopped in at Šertev’s to ask if it wouldn’t be better to hide with the partisans. The partisans had a bunker near Šertev’s, Grandmother says. The partisans said there was nothing to worry about, Mici told her, the police couldn’t prove anything, she was still very young and going to the partisans just as winter was setting in was very hard for women. As long as she wasn’t in immediate danger, she should wait and keep calm.

  Mici went and registered with the police. They told her that others had sworn she worked for the partisans. She denied everything but the judgment stood. She was deported to the camp. Mici was filthy and disturbed, Grandmother recalled. She sensed Mici wouldn’t survive the camp and she’d given up. On that day, she sensed it would be the end of her foster daughter. Three months later Leni wrote that Mici’s ashes had been sent from Lublin. That was too much for me, Grandmother said. I wept the whole night through. The women in the barrack told me not to give in, because in camp strong feelings are heralds of death. Mici was gassed in Lublin, she was gassed in Lublin, Grandmother repeats as if trying, again, to grasp that fact. From that day on she was no good for outside work, she could barely stand on her own two feet, she continues. But before that, look, on May 10th, Grandmother says and leafs through her camp notebook, on May 10th, I saw a sign in the sky. I saw my brother Miklavž, Katrca’s husband, and I told Katrca, who was your grandfather’s sister. Katrca was already in the infirmary. I described the sign and told her it boded no good. Not long after that, Katrca heard that Miklavž had died in Dachau, Grandmother recounts. She lost her will to survive. She said she wanted to join her husband. She wrote more poems on her sickbed, she always wrote poems. It was a very dangerous thing to do.

  A Russian woman was beaten to death for writing poems in the bunker, but Katrca wanted her poems to be smuggled to freedom. Grandmother tells me she doesn’t know if it worked. She visited Katrca, she always visited Katrca, even when
she herself was in the infirmary and had to spend fourteen days in the ward with the dying. Those who died in the infirmary during the night were piled up in front of the baths, the emaciated bodies lay on the ground like sticks of wood and we tripped over them. Katrca had an abscessed back, Grandmother says and, lying on the bed, in my imagination Katrca’s back looks like a painted cloth, saturated with circle upon circle of red, mixed with wilted rose petals, covered with a pustulent crust. Lying behind my grandmother’s back, staring at the image of Katrca’s back, I float in the past as in a drop of time that circulates within my mind.

  Grandmother breathes heavily and gasps for air. She stayed in the infirmary for fourteen days, she reports, then she recovered a bit. There were also Czech women doctors in the infirmary. They could speak German and they tried to help. The Czechs stuck together, she could sense it. The Blockova assigned her to inside work after she’d recovered. She had to wash the big cauldrons in the camp kitchen. That kept her alive, Grandmother says, because she could often steal what was thrown away and eat it. She stashed away what was left lying around and brought it to the other inmates. She could even save turnip or potato peelings for Katrca, now and again, and that was lucky because the food for the inmates was garbage that at home would have been given to the pigs or thrown away.