Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

Well then, Father says after picking up the bag, let’s be on our way! He seems to consider launching another round at the hostile table, but when apparently nothing occurs to him, he opens the door.

  We step out onto the street. The main square is empty. I hope no one stole the sacks of flour, Father says as we turn towards the church. The tractor stands in the cold like a forbidding ghost. I put my suitcase in the trailer and Father lets the grocery bag drop with a crash. We climb into the driver’s cab. After several attempts to start it, the engine springs to life. Father’s legs rise and fall like the limbs of a marionette as he steps on the clutch and the gas pedal. His driving sends chills down my spine. I ask him if he has anything against my driving home. For a while, Father drives along the winding curves of the slippery, snow-covered road without answering, then he stops. You want to drive, he shouts, you don’t have a driver’s license or the slightest idea! Be my guest, he says and leaves me the driver’s seat.

  I immediately have problems putting the tractor in gear and Father jeers, what did I say, the show-off, doesn’t know a thing, doesn’t have a license, but she wants to drive!

  The road is slippery and I’m frightened. Father is getting more and more worked up. He calls me a snitch, Father says, outraged, calling me a snitch and a bandit, I won’t put up with that, I’m going to teach him that no one calls me a snitch or a bandit. Stop, he orders, I have to go back, I have to tell him, Father shouts and grabs the steering wheel.

  I stop the tractor and beg Father, who is getting ready to climb out, to stay in the cab. It’s the middle of the night, the other men went home long ago, there’s no point in getting upset about comments by some imbecile. Easy for you to say, Father says. No one can treat me like that, period! He looks at me, his eye wide and gasping for air as if he were suffocating. I stare doggedly at the road, decide not to pay him any attention, and put the tractor in gear.

  The steady throb of the motor calms him. As I drive the vehicle across a level part of the valley, where it opens outs and the wooded slopes recede from the edge of the road, Father seems to have fallen asleep next to me. Suddenly he wakes with a start and says, I’ve lost my gloves, my gloves slipped out of my hand. We have to turn around and drive back! I can’t turn the tractor around, I say, we can look for them tomorrow. He’ll go back the few meters on foot, Father grumbles. They can’t be far, he just had them in his hands, he says and tries to stand up. I stop. Father gets out onto the road and says, I’ll be right back. Swearing, I climb down from the driver’s seat and watch Father’s dark silhouette draw away.

  The cold grips me like a painful shudder. In the night silence that sparkles around me, the creak of the running engine sounds like a ticking music. The winter night is turning into a fixed image of moonlight frozen on the gleaming snow. Then the layer of snow lifts abruptly as if it were wearing a feathered mantel that rises breathlessly. The stars in the sky are like falling snow crystals or flakes of ice rising further and further into the endless expanse. The valley widens beneath the burning air. A stream’s icy water crackles next to the road.

  Father has not returned. I run back along the road and call hesitantly, ati, Papa, but the stream swallows my call. Near the end of the level stretch, I notice a dark spot on the embankment. When I get closer, I recognize Father lying on his back on a pile of snow.

  Are you not feeling well, I ask, should I get help?

  Let me lie here, Father says, just let me lie here. I don’t want to go on, I’m going to stay here. Sveršina showed me how it’s done. Sveršina can sleep in the snow like a partisan and I can too.

  What about the gloves, I ask.

  They’re under my head, Father says.

  I have run out of patience. I grab Father’s hand and pull him up, stand up, stand up, I scold him, but Father just lies back down in the snow and crosses his arms. If everyone else is acting crazy, why shouldn’t I, my thoughts race desperately and I scream in a Hitler imitation, On your feet, Comrade! What is the meaning of this? Stand up, fall in, move, march, march! And I raise my hand in a Hitler salute. Father laughs a laugh that sounds like a scream. He stands up immediately and salutes.

  Heil Hitler, he says swaying but this time from laughter. I spin around in a goose-step and start belting out a partisan song. Father stumbles after me, yelling, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, ta je pa dobra, this is good, this is really good! I manage to start the tractor before he climbs in and sits down. I sing the partisan song without stopping, even as I drive, because I am worried that Father will want to get out as soon as I stop. But he is happy to follow my lead. He laughs, conducts, sings, slaps me on the back and keeps repeating, the two of us, we’re the real half-wits, we’re fighting for freedom and bread!

  At home, in bed, I lie awake for a long time. The room is cold, I’m chilled to the bone and a cold rash covers my arms and legs. The frost has crept under my skin. It wants to spend the winter inside me, it seems, and I’m too tired to fend it off.

  That night I dream I’m running away from home. I’m waiting for a train coming down from the mountain that is very delayed. I just manage to climb onto the last car. I lie face down on the roof of the last compartment so that we can climb the steep mountain slope faster because the man who doesn’t want to let me go is on the lookout just under the summit and he wants to pull me from the moving train. He created a bloodbath in our house. He killed all the children by cutting their throats. Even my father shouldn’t see me, he is not to know I am there. I can see him in the compartment below me, lying on a hospital bed, and I am afraid he might fall out of it. He is very small and frail.

  THE trips between Vienna and my hometown turn into expeditions through time, into trips through different periods and versions of history that exist in parallel. The closer I get to my hometown, the stronger the feeling grows that I’m traveling into the past, and the further away I am, the faster hours and days speed by. Traveling back and forth, I feel like someone who has been flung through eras, who has dropped from the future, or who has arrived too late.

  Since I started at the university, Father’s cries for help have taken on a societal, even political dimension. I start thinking in larger, public contexts. I am convinced that this country’s general stance toward the past is what makes our family stories appear so strange and relegates them to such isolation. They have almost no connection to the present. Between the official version of Austria’s history and its actual history stretches a no-man’s land in which it’s easy to get lost. I picture myself shuttling back and forth between a dark, forgotten part of the cellar in the house of Austria and its bright, richly furnished spaces. No one in the bright rooms seems to guess or wants to imagine that there are people in this building confined by politics to history’s cellar, where they are besieged and poisoned by their own memories.

  In a Slovenian anthology, I come upon two poems by Katrca Miklav, my grandfather’s sister, which were saved from the camp, and I am strangely moved, as if a long forgotten embryonic memory had stirred in my thoughts. I am startled that it exists. In the explanatory notes I read that three days before she died Katrca wrote a few poems on small scraps of paper and gave them to Angela Piskernik, a fellow inmate from Eisenkappel. Katrca believed Angela would appreciate the poems since she respected the written word. Angela had the poems published in a Slovenian cultural magazine after the war. And so they were preserved, the notes say.

  After several of my poems appeared in magazines, a publisher takes on my first volume of poetry. I can hardly believe it: a book that will bundle my Slovenian poems into something daring that could give my life as a student a new direction. It will compel me to express myself with more clarity, more precision, I hope. It will delay the disappearance of the Slovenian language in Carinthia, I think enthusiastically, it could create the illusion that this language still has a role.

  Writing about cultural politics is easier for me than writing “I” in my texts. My self does not say I. It plays on its own stage. It speaks in coded l
anguage, it is hidden underneath old and new costumes, it randomly tries on languages like attractive or functional clothing as it searches for its real face. It rummages through stockpiles of explanations and meanings.

  I doggedly train myself to discern at least the tone of my thoughts, to recognize it among the multitude of other tones. I have barely heard it and it’s gone because it’s too faint, because it gets lost in the tangle of voices, in my efforts to pull together a sense of my self.

  Convinced nonetheless that I’ve heard that tone, I cannot get away from it, I constantly seek it out, I long for another encounter with it in which we can throw off sparks and devise a melody that will unite us in a wonderful fashion.

  IN MY third year of university, Father writes me one of his rare letters. Greetings, Mic, he writes. He is home alone, Mother is off taking a cure. That’s why he has to write me a letter and ask how I am. He is not doing well. He is forwarding the mail that came to my old address along with money. I should spend it however I like. He closes with the phrase ‘with regards from the worthless one,’ od ničvrednega, he writes, as if he crossed himself off with that signature.

  At the beginning of summer, a friend drives me home. Father is beside himself.

  After the young man has left and Mother has shown me her new flowerbeds, Father locks the front door, leaving us outside. He yells out the kitchen window that he refuses to let me in, tramp of a whore that I am. I am so hurt I threaten to call the police immediately if he won’t let us in the house. I can do without a father like that, I shout.

  Report me to the police if you want, Father roars back. If nothing occurs to you other than reporting me, you can stay outside and your mother can too.

  He’s jealous, Mother says, we’ll wait a while and then climb in through the kitchen window. I wonder if I should feel sorry for myself or if the situation is simply too grotesque to take seriously. I’m relieved that the kitchen window is not latched. Mother takes me through the garden one more time and when we come back the door is still locked. In the woodshed I find an old milking stool, which I set under the window so we can climb over the window boxes, onto the windowsill, and into the kitchen.

  Father is in the living room, sitting on the bench next to the oven and looking out the south window at the other side of the valley. I go to him.

  Hand me the key, I say. He gives me a wild and reproachful look.

  Get out, he growls, go on and call the police!

  Where is the key, I demand.

  Here, he says and throws the front door key on the floor.

  I pick up the key and give him a sidelong glance.

  Go on, get the police, disappear, he says.

  Just then I am seized by a fierce, defiant rage. Not with me, I think, not with me! On a sudden impulse, I go up to Father and caress his head twice. As if I had been doing an experiment, I gently stroke his hair. Father caves under the palm of my hand. His head dips towards his chest as if his neck muscles suddenly abandoned their duty. He swallows a sigh, yes, Mic, he says, yes, and then, a shit life, kurc, pa to življenje!

  For a moment, I am reconciled. I could smile, but the smile on my face turns into a mask of rage, indignation, and sympathy. That’s all it takes to intimidate Father, I think, that’s all it takes. But I made the calculation without taking him into account, because Father will not let me change him.

  That night, I stand in a bathroom in front of the sink and my job is to hand a pill to each man who enters the room. Men I think I recognize come in. I give each of them a pill and they all swallow them willingly. Then they immediately double up with cramps and die. After a while I begin to doubt my executioner’s duty. I don’t want to watch them croak any longer. A stranger comes in. He’s the one I’ve been waiting for. We fall into each other’s arms and sink to the floor with complete abandon. A window above the sink opens. Half of my family is peering in and pointing at us. I stop our lovemaking and go around the corner into a palatial room in which an enormous table is set for celebration. Father and Mother are sitting at the head of the table and they invite me to join the feast.

  THE hills of my home region have turned into a trap that reaches for me and snaps shut every summer. It is more and more difficult for me to find a connection between my current life and the place I was born, and I contemplate creating escape routes to smuggle my self-confidence out of the valley. I try to find solace in the landscape, to sniff out a place I can live without feeling threatened. I hope to creep under the landscape’s skin over the course of the summer, to discover its secrets so that I won’t leave with empty hands, with nothing more than my own skin.

  How can I master the scene of my childhood? How can I visualize its forms? Should I start from the fact that the valley is designed as the landscape’s cul-de-sac, in which all roads and paths come to a dead end? Should I claim that it looks like an open sock wedged between the hills to keep them apart? Confirm that all the hillsides sink into a valley floor marked by a river and a road? That the valley tries to defy its narrowness and even succeeds, here and there, in padding sections with level meadows and fields? But the meadows must soon adapt to the constriction and nestle up against the next escarpment. Anything expansive has retreated from this landscape.

  A cold breath of air rises from the stream. This chill is spread throughout the landscape by the adenostyles’ flat leaves. It rises to the edges of the meadows and hovers over the mixed forests. Above the tree line, rock shimmers under a thin layer of humus, like the bones of the mountains’ skeletons pushed down into the valley by avalanches of snow. Buzzards, hawks, and eagles circle above the trees. They emerge out of the forest silence, isolate and unexpected, soar over the deep valleys, circle, and disappear into invisible cracks in the mountainsides. They rarely swoop down to the ground to snatch up prey. They’re in no hurry. The prey is theirs for the taking after they’ve driven it into the narrow valley.

  Men have established their properties on flat stretches above the slopes. Here and there you can find a meadow like a hammock, a level surface with room for several buildings and gardens to sprawl. On spring days, the mountainsides seem to rebel against the people moving over them. Yet in midsummer, carpets of light and heat stretch out in front of the farmhouses and exert an irresistible allure and draw the inhabitants straight to them. You see them sitting alone or in groups on the grass or in front of their houses, lying on the edges of the fields, abandoning themselves to the sun, exhausted by the heat. They swivel their heads in all directions, their eyes directed at the neighboring properties and forests and seeking out the hues of shade in the hollows and on the hummocks of the valley. The landscape solidifies with the approach of autumn. The familiar chill rises again from the hollows. Only the abandoned tunnels in the forests seem out of place with their small mouths gaping above rock piles overgrown with scrub. Some are still accessible, protected by bluffs, cages of stone.

  I think of Grandmother, how she scanned the landscape every morning, of Father’s gaze, how he first examined the sky, then the position of the sun or moon, before looking at the ground. Every day the state of nature was palpated by eye. Today it’s time to harvest or to plow, they’d decide. Today the ground is ready and the air is warm enough, Father would say. The cloud formations, the evening light, and the shriek of an owl are ill omens, Grandmother would prophesy. Her secret landscape was marked with her own particular names, the old wheat field, the abandoned potato field, Chestnut Hollow, Fish Spawn Spot, Sun Boulder, Dripping Cliff, Devil’s Gap, Ghost Knoll, Lily Field, Carnation Slope, Yarrow Meadow. The meadows and slopes facing the sun have names associated with light, the shadowed knolls and sites have shaded names that don’t appear on any map. The forest paths lead past places of death: Fritz was killed here by a falling branch, Grandmother knew, here three men were charred by lightning, in Lightning Glade next to the Death Beech near the stream, the screeching girls in the stream on the Poset farm, where the dead walk and wail, the Wild Valley where they found the skull.
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  For all my efforts to get closer to it, the landscape of my childhood leads me astray. It lies awkwardly at my feet and leaves my questions unanswered. It remains unmoved. The paths through the landscape are nothing more than obstacles. They contradict themselves and lead me in the opposite direction when they were supposed to reach the center. The area won’t admit a single straight line, just crooked slopes and hills entangled around a higher peak. The forested sides of the valley are recognizable in their telescoping contradictions and defiance of all cardinal points. As soon as I think I’m on the right path, I get lost. I have to climb up to higher elevations to get a view of my meanderings. Up high, under the wide-open sky, I can untangle the snarl below. It becomes clear to me that the landscape conceals itself and does not want its puzzles unraveled, that it swallows those who are impatient and spits them out undigested the moment they expect it to be accommodating and mild.

  Once in a while, after a long hike through a steep, overgrown wood, the countryside rewards me with unimagined views that reveal a gentle and friendly side of this land. Rough cliff faces look softer, the regions’ sharp edges are smoothed and rounded. An unexpected expanse opens before my eyes and lets them range over the valley and cross the narrow canyons without effort or vertigo. From such viewpoints, I can see the Košuta’s craggy white cliffs to the west where the flatlands meet the mountains. The white mountain face will assert itself longest against the darker blue-green color of the beginning plains. To the south, the sea is mirrored in the light blue sky as if the firmament were looking with one eye at the Adriatic and winking at the valleys with the other.

  As soon as I leave this spot, my eyes are pervaded by sharp grasses and plants, overgrown with scrub, and are finally exhausted from constantly turning to the sky, the only orientation point. And as soon as I leave, I feel like a visitor whom nature has cast adrift on the street after a lavish feast and who grudgingly hurries away because the rich landscape lies heavy in her stomach.