Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  I can only recover with difficulty from the havoc wreaked on me by staying up all night with Father, nights in which none of us can sleep because he will not calm down. I’m worn out from his fits and cannot find the words to describe the impact of his outbursts. My attempts to speak are no more than meek stammering and silence because I’m embarrassed by my incomprehension and am ashamed for Father.

  In spite of it all, I come to his defense, as all his relatives instinctively do. They seem to have come to an agreement that his outbursts must be respected, that there is no point in asking anyone for advice since, in any case, you can never be sure of being understood or receiving assistance. The reigning attitude is that you cannot escape fate. You have to accept your destiny like the old family names because those who do try to flee vanish in the distance, disappear like smoke.

  I write my first poems, mere groping for words, and live through the period before my final examination in the student dormitory as in a no-man’s land, where I have been granted an interval I can fill with daydreams and nocturnal fantasies. I hope I will be able to find or invent the right language, and I conceive phantom sentences that I launch into the future. All that is thought and felt, experienced and feared, will only come to words later, they will meet or be joined in a phrase, I hope, some day, when the time comes.

  IN CONTRAST to the combative Leni, who was politicized by the war, Father is suspicious of politics and refuses to take part in the demonstrations that follow the anti-Slovenian Ortstafelsturm or “place-name sign storm” when bilingual road signs were destroyed throughout the province by German-national Carinthians, because he believes you should let sleeping dogs lie. He and his companions from the war years did not want anyone swearing or spitting at them on the street. Even Michi is convinced, after a rally of Slovenian Carinthians in Klagenfurt, that for decades to come, the German Carinthians in Klagenfurt would resent the Slovenians, the children of the farmers, laborers, and clerical workers from the southern part of the province for publicly protesting and demanding compliance with the Austrian State Treaty, especially for demanding that Article 7 of the treaty be followed, in other words, demonstrating for something that means absolutely nothing to the majority of the population. The majority, on the other hand, feel that the national treaty is more a castigation than a state contract, a punishment meted out to them after the war on terms dictated by the occupying powers.

  Father has lost the conviction that getting involved politically is worthwhile, or maybe he never had it. The idea you can change anything is foreign to him. Father believes that engaging in politics is to put your life at risk. He believes absolutely everything is at stake, not just individual interests. He cannot separate his own interests from his survival. He is skeptical of anyone who acts under the protection of a political organization or looks for support in an ideological creed. He can’t recall a single political slogan he could believe. The only thing he has to say about his time with the partisans is that, as a child, he was never assigned to a combat unit, that the partisans saved his life, and that almost the entire time he had the feeling he was on the run.

  I remember that I rarely saw Father emerge from his political reservation as fully as he did following a rare excursion to Slovenia with the Partisan Association.

  On his return home, he raves about how well received the Carinthian partisans were in Yugoslavia. He describes how much pomp and circumstance surround the partisans in Slovenia, how supportive they appear of their state and how conscious of their power, how there is still something militant about them, which you can only say about the functionaries when it comes to the Carinthian partisans. He mentions the impressive partisan chorus from Trieste and hums a few fighting songs, as if for emphasis to show that he can still sing or hum along. Here, partisans are always bad-mouthed as bandits and murderers, he says, like after that ceremony in Klagenfurt when we were given awards sent by the Yugoslavian president Tito in recognition of our service in the resistance against National Socialism. It turned into a riot in which his cousin Peter grabbed one of the hecklers and threw him in the bushes. He felt then that they had kept some of their fighting spirit, Father says. In any case, he and few companions quickly drove to Eisenkappel and ordered goulash and beer at the Koller inn. We left the certificates in the car or there would have been another brawl at the Koller, Father says.

  A few years later, Father receives a medal from the Austrian president for his service in the liberation of Austria. Father says that he’s proud of his medal and that he’s going to have the certificate framed. All the same, he is convinced that politics are a swindle and simply lead people like him around by the nose.

  Political occasions of the Carinthian variety, funerals, or family reunions trap Father in the past and he has difficulty finding his way out again. He’s tormented for weeks after an encounter in an inn during which someone he had been drinking with told him he was responsible for his own misfortune and it was his father and mother’s fault that he ended up in this situation. If his father hadn’t joined the partisans and fought against Hitler and for the Slovenians, then nothing would have happened to him. Why does he get so worked up, whoever says A, also has to say B, the boor said and none of the others wanted to speak against him because alcohol had gotten the better of them all. Father is hit hard and I am distressed because I sense that he loses any capacity to defend himself when he drinks, that it renders him vulnerable to every provocation, every insinuation, every rumor, and that he is immediately ready to doubt himself and defer to those who are taunting him.

  Only visits from his closest relatives, his brother and his brother’s family, or the cousins with whom he lived through the war years, make him strangely happy. We children are glad when our sitting room is full of guests chattering happily around a full table. They laugh, tell stories, and sing songs. Occasionally, one of the guests will stand and give a speech. Father weeps without embarrassment and sometimes others cry too, especially his cousin Zofka, of whom Father is particularly fond. When they reminisce about the dramatic day on which Grandmother was arrested and Peter and Tonči recall how humiliating and painful the slaps were that a police officer searching the house had given them, they always mention an older, more restrained, red-haired officer who had tears in his eyes when he looked at the desperate boys. The tears of the policeman who had assisted with Grandmother’s arrest bring tears to the storytellers’ eyes, too, as if the stranger’s emotions were making their own sorrow possible, as if their despair were reflected more convincingly and more vividly in the unknown policeman’s eyes than in their own souls. Michi tells of the Šporns’ daughter who was her age at the time, in other words still a child. Policemen beat her unconscious with the butts of their guns on the bridge to the Kupitz inn in the Remschenig valley because her parents joined the partisans, he says. Her classmate, who later became her husband and who accompanied her home was also almost beaten to death by the police. He still has scars on his ribs from the beating. Father knows about it. He also claimed that Count Thurn saved the children’s lives. Since the policemen did not stop beating the children even after they were lying on the ground unconscious, the Count stood in front of the children and then had them taken to the Kupitzs’ to be cared for. The police would have taken away thirteen entire families in the Remschenig Valley in a single day if some of them hadn’t been able to escape to the partisans during the arrests, Michi says and asks, can you imagine, in a valley with not even twenty holdings.

  IN MY final years of secondary school, Father develops a bashful interest in my academic progress and shows it casually and shyly. He looks at my report cards and reads the names of the subjects out loud because the bilingual designations appeal to him. When the snow is high one winter morning when I have to leave early for Klagenfurt and Michi, who always drives me to the bus in Eisenkappel at the beginning of the week, can’t get his car out of the garage, Father gets up at four in the morning and starts to plow the driveways with his tractor. He drive
s to Michi’s house and, in reverse, pushes the mounds of snow from the access road. Sometimes he stops on the main road and waits until Michi drives up next to the tractor and gets out. The two men share their first morning smoke in the dark and discuss the weather. They are burned in my memory as two shivering men, standing in the drifting snow and blocking my way to school.

  When my parents are invited to the graduation ceremony, my father doesn’t want to come. He can’t imagine himself going to a school event, never, Father says. He is angry with Mother when she goes to the ceremony because, in his view, she is adorning herself with borrowed plumes.

  To me, my future after graduation looks only like a white cloud bank, and I convince myself to move toward it, out into uncertainty.

  My parents restrain themselves, not a single suggestion passes their lips, they leave my choice of study entirely to me, they don’t try to meddle in something they do not know or have ever taken into consideration. Their daughter should do whatever she wants as long as she doesn’t bring shame on them, because a concept like shame means more to my parents than the word “studies.” They use that word warily, like all foreign words. After months, Mother hesitantly pronounces “theater studies,” the title of my chosen program, and Father doesn’t even try to remember it. When asked what his daughter is studying, he says that it has something to do with plays and that’s enough for him since he doesn’t know anything about intellectual work and would rather not think about such things.

  I decide to pursue theater studies because I’m convinced, after seeing many plays, that the stage could become a space for me in which I could face all my complications and despair without danger. The catastrophes on stage are all contained, the protagonists all survive no matter how many times they die. They present their disappointments, dreams, and malice, their love and their hatred, they can yield to their emotions and their nagging fears. A performance has to start with a beginning and does not have to have a happy ending. Yet it always has an ending. The theater can’t attack you from behind the way life can, even when it flails about. It’s all a game, all up in the air.

  In Vienna, I start trying to write again and write in Slovenian as if I could recollect myself, as if Slovenian could lead me back to the feelings from which I have become estranged. A mourning that doesn’t yet know what it is called or even what it is lies waiting to be named, waiting for me to solve its mystery. It wants to be bound to me with words like all the other emotions that swirl nebulously inside me. My sentences are clumsy, as if they were composed of fragments of random letter sequences. They resemble letters that cannot be attributed to anyone or traced back to their senders and don’t want to betray who had written them.

  Mother writes that she is considering leaving home. She can’t bear it any longer and is going to find a job.

  When I come home for Christmas, she tells me that she talked it all over with Father. He has promised to change, she says uncertainly, as if she were aware this means giving up some of her hopes. She is determined to take small liberties, to go to a spa, join excursions, or go on Sunday hikes. She needs to get away from home now and then and be exposed to new ideas so that she’s better able to bear the weekdays. I encourage her in her new resolutions and ask if she ever imagined living in the city or ever considered a divorce. But for Mother divorce is out of the question.

  IN THE winter of my second year of university, I arrive in Eisenkappel late one evening, wondering how to cover the seven kilometers to Lepena with my suitcases since I had not been able to find anyone who could pick me up and drive me into the valley. I stand in the snow-covered main square and decide to look in the inn where I am bound to find men from Lepena.

  As I pass the church, I see Father’s tractor with a trailer parked in front of the Slovenian savings bank. Three sacks of flour lie uncovered and exposed to the cold on the loader wagon. I check the Koller inn, but one of the waitress says he has not been there. So I go the Bošti, a run-down inn with dark, low-ceilinged rooms. I do, in fact, find Father there. He greets me with a loud well, hello there! This one’s mine, he beams, she came all the way from Vienna to get me!

  As the men at his table squeeze together to make room for me, the guests at the next table barely glance up. I put my suitcase down, hang up my coat, and give Father a kiss on the cheek. The men pick up their conversation, which I had interrupted. Tine, whom they jokingly call the General, was just recounting an incident from their time as partisans and they wanted to hear the end of the story. The next table is noisily occupied. The men burst into frequent ear-splitting guffaws.

  Tine tells them how, as company commander, he had to leave three wounded men with their relatives in Koprivna. The farmers gave them medical attention in secret. It was especially bad during the last winter of the war. His company had had to evacuate their infirmary in Solčava and they received orders to transport seventeen wounded fighters through deep snow to a distant valley. Three severely wounded men died during the transport that night. I could hardly bear it when partisans died, Tine says, and the political commissars’ mania for control and for issuing orders. They were constantly inspecting everything, they searched his backpack and forbade him from writing letters to his girlfriend, whom they’d classified as unreliable. They meddled in our private lives and issued pointless orders, Tine says. One of the men at our table asks what happened with Peršman, after all, Tine’s company was near the farm. Tine takes a deep breath, yes, Peršman, he says, every day they expected news that the war was over. He and his company had waited near the farm for almost three weeks with two other units. Even then, Tine had thought it was irresponsible, but the commander wanted to wait. The partisans had even been practicing dancing for when peace was declared, that’s how foolish we were, Tine recalls. A man from Globasnitz fell asleep on his watch and didn’t see that SS units were approaching the Peršman farm. Then the catastrophe occurred, just ten days before the end of the war. No one expected it. The partisans had withdrawn after a skirmish because they wanted to avoid a battle, then an SS unit attacked the entire family. After the massacre of the Peršman family, he had been beside himself, Tine says, the dead civilians from his time in the Wehrmacht in Poland and Russia came back to haunt him, before his eyes, the entire war became a tower of civilian corpses, horrible, he says, horrible! That night everything was mixed up for him, the Russians hanged in the Ukrainian villages, the burned down farms, the smell of burning flesh that spread over the Peršman farm.

  At that moment, one of the men at the next table said, that’s a lie, it was the partisans who murdered the Peršman family. How’s that, Tine asks and raises his head.

  I suddenly have the feeling that the men at Father’s table have fallen into an ambush.

  You did nothing more than terrorize the local population. You all fought for Yugoslavia. You are traitors to your country plain and simple, the man at the next table shouts. You mean we terrorized those in the population who were loyal to the Reich, Tine says gradually getting ahold of himself, that’s something I know inside and out! You still believe that under Hitler’s Germany you were fighting for Austria. For the expansion of German territory, sure, but not for Austria! A free Austria was written off like never before. So is that still your country, the German Reich, even now when you call us traitors, Tine asked threateningly but the man remained obstinate. You should all be called up before a military court, he persists, the English should have locked you up instead of the respectable citizens who did their duty.

  The English were with us during the war, Tine counters, we belonged to the Allies, if that name rings a bell! But there’s no room in your head for that, is there? After so many years, you people can’t think of anything to say about the Nazi period other than repeating your propaganda, Tine says in disgust. He should have relied on his intuition and gone home.

  So now he wants to go, someone roared from the next table, during the war he would have shot us on the spot, but now he wants to go home!

  He
wouldn’t have shot you, but I would have, if I’d caught you, a man at our table says with a threatening stare.

  Echoes of the war surround us for a moment. The inn is transformed into a battle ground on which the opposing sides are taking stands.

  I’ll remember that, the cowed attacker says.

  Father is nervous. Tine tells the man at our table who had leapt up angrily, sit down, come on now, sit down!

  The next table renews the attack.

  And you, Zdravko, the loudmouth says to my father, you were nothing but a snitch. Your stateless president can give you all the decorations he wants. For me you’re just a bandit like all the others.

  My heart is racing and I have an overwhelming need to hurl something at the attacker and protect my father, but nothing else occurs to me than to call him a Nazi. You Nazi, I say and I’m shocked by my faltering voice. Father laughs a short, pained laugh and says to the belligerent man, I’m a bandit and you’re a cretin!

  I’m going to get my gun right now, the militant defender at our table announces leaping to his feet again.

  If you go to get it, you can stay home, the waitress says firmly. I will call the police this instant!

  The front is breached. The opposing armies fall back.

  I ask Father to pay, wanting to leave right away. Father raises his hand defensively. I’ll decide when I leave, he says. Check, Father calls after a frightening moment and throws some money on the table. The waitress’s hands tremble as she pulls out her pad and adds up the bill. Father gives her a generous tip and tries to stand. He sways. There should be a bag of groceries around here somewhere, he says, we can’t forget it. I hold his winter jacket out for him and point to the grocery bag on the floor.