The underside of this stretch of land, its dark reflection, will be my refuge, the nocturnal area that will swallow and absorb every place I have ever been, the avenues, the cities, the busses, the trains, the airplanes. It will gather everything in and toss it all into oblivion. High-rises will spring up in the middle of the fields and theater stages will be built into the mountain and surrounded by forests. The sea will creep up close to my house and linger in the depths of the valleys. The sky will be a retractable roof and on many nights will rise up from the darkness to its firmament.
The landscape in which I’ll find refuge that summer will blaze in the strongest colors. Light will flood over the hills, the air will shimmer. Hawk-eyed, I will direct my gaze into the valley. I will feel my way through the land with the waves of heat streaming from my scalp. I will scan my surroundings with hidden sensors. A group of men will stride over the high valley. They will go up the mountain where a railroad runs that will take them to their places of work or into the city that hums at the base of the mountain. My brother and I will get on a tram that stops in front of our house and we’ll ride it to France. In the valley basin behind my house, I’ll get on the tram again and introduce myself to all the passengers. It will be evening by the time we arrive in Provence and we will enter a tower. Outside, golden fields of wheat will swell around hills covered with light green grass. The sky will be deep red, velvety black. Why does the wheat field glow?
GRANDFATHER’S sister Leni has recorded her memories of her time with the partisans on audiotape. The transcription is translated into German and published as a book. It is to be presented in Vienna at the State Secretariat for Women’s Affairs. For my relatives, it’s a rare occasion to travel to the capital. Father decides to accompany his cousins. It’s the first time he will see Vienna. I’m to collect him from the Landesgericht, Vienna’s Civil Court, because their tour group wants to see the place where the first thirteen victims from Zell Pfarre and the valleys around Eisenkappel, personally sentenced to death by Roland Freisler, the President of the People’s Court, were executed.
When I get off the tram at Landsgerichtstrasse, I see the small group waiting for me in front of the court building’s enormous entrance. I wave them over. They quickly cross the large intersection, but when the walk signal turns red, Father stops in the middle of the multilane road and can’t go forwards or backwards. The passing cars honk and crowd past him. I rush over to help him.
Father is trembling when I take him by the hand. Come, hurry, I say.
I can’t, he says with a smile and only wakes from his paralysis when the pedestrian light turns green again. Vienna is not for me, he sighs once he reaches the sidewalk, everything moves too fast. Why didn’t he keep walking, Michi wants to know, and Father shrugs. He is holding a plastic jug in his left hand.
What are you carrying around, I ask. Cider, Father answers. He had brought ten liters of cider for the celebration and has been carrying the canister around pointlessly for half the day, but just leaving it somewhere didn’t seem like an intelligent thing to do.
I suggest we accompany our relatives to the Ringstrasse and from there I will take Father to the city center and show him St. Stephen’s cathedral and the Michaelerplatz, where the Theater Institute is.
We stroll past the Institute building towards the university. With my arm outstretched, I trace the curve of the Ringstrasse and point out the parliament building, city hall, and the Burg, as it’s called, saying, look, I often go to this theater. Nice, very nice, Michi says, but Father declares that you’d never get him inside so grand a building, wild horses couldn’t drag him in there. You’ll have to go into the palatial university building when I get my doctorate, I say. No, Father counters, he’ll wait outside for me on his tractor. Laughing, we set up a meeting place near the State Opera.
I continue on with Father. On Heldenplatz he stops under the statue of Archduke Karl and stands up straight, as if he wanted to raise his eyes from the shelter of his brow towards the light. With his old, gray-green suit, he looks like someone who has wandered into the city by mistake. His brown tie has a loud green and orange pattern. The collar of his white shirt is twisted and one of the points is sticking out. I try to straighten it as if in passing, but it pops right back up. Father has cinched up his baggy trousers so tightly with a belt that folds have gathered around his waist. His sunken chest has not filled out a jacket for a long time. His hair is short, but shaggy at the nape. I catch myself blaming Mother for the shortcomings in Father’s appearance. How can she allow him to let himself go like this, I think and immediately regret expecting Mother to look after him like a little boy. It would never occur to Father to buy himself anything new. Just trying on clothes in a shop would be too great a hurdle. The saleswomen’s glances unnerve and annoy him unbearably. He feels defenseless and thrown back on himself and his pitiful appearance, as he says. Father’s forlornness in the city troubles me. You could easily overlook him, I think, but if you talked to him, you would immediately feel responsible for him, you would automatically look out for him, to make sure he didn’t go astray.
Under the Michaelerkuppel, the dome at the entrance of the imperial palace, I point out the stairway to the Theater Institute with more than a little pride. I tell Father that I’m studying a regal subject and he asks what regal means. Imperial, I say. Empress of the dung heap, he quips with a smirk. We walk along the Kohlmarkt and the Graben to the cathedral. Father is visibly impressed. He asks when the church was built and listens as I reel off a few dates. Enormous church, he says and sits down in a side aisle before the altar of the Virgin Mary. I make a tour of the cathedral. When I’m done, Father is waiting for me outside. Let’s go, he says, he’d like to have something to drink. The crowds on the cathedral square bother him. He looks around for a quieter spot, and on the Graben we find a café counter that doesn’t seem to intimidate him. He orders a white wine spritzer and takes off his jacket. After his first sip, he rolls up his sleeves and fumbles for his cigarettes. Do you want one, he asks. I suddenly remember the plastic jug. Where did you leave the jug, I ask. Next to Mary’s altar. I thought the Virgin Mary might want a taste of my cider, Father says and grins.
I want a cigarette. Give me one, I say, and Father lights me a cigarette for the first time. Since when do you smoke? he asks. Since just now, I lie and think of the jug in the St. Stephen’s cathedral. Father gestures with his hand and the ash from his cigarette, which he had forgotten to tap off, falls on his trousers. I notice a stain on his trousers and rush to convince myself, before I let myself get irritated, that his stained trousers are not important, that I should focus on the essential, on the fact that I’m walking around Vienna with Father for the first time. Father tells me that the Secretary for Women’s Issues was very welcoming and gave a challenging speech. She has guts, he says appreciatively, it wouldn’t have been possible in Carinthia. I ask if he has taken a look at the book, knowing that he never reads books. He’d even put my volume of poetry in the bookcase unopened. Yes, yes, he says. There’s a picture of him in it, but he’s not going to read it, even though Leni mentions him. Books don’t always tell the truth, he says, they tell made-up stories. He, however, is interested in the truth, in what really happened.
He orders two more spritzers and stands at the counter smiling, one hand resting lightly on his hip, the other raised holding a cigarette, while the waiter serves our drinks. For a moment, everything seems possible.
Father tells me the plum trees are full of fruit and that he hopes he can distill some very good plum brandy this year. He was thinking about getting attractive bottles for the best batches so that he could sell them, but he’s still mulling it over. Besides, he bought a few sheep, he says, because he intends to keep only two cows. All the rest doesn’t add up, too much work, too complicated. He just can’t understand why, despite the long, hard grind, he can barely make ends meet. It will all fall apart, he says and smiles. All of it. He crosses his arms, his cigarette glowing betwe
en the fingers of his hand. Then it occurs to him that his brother Tonči can still remember seeing Jurij Tavčman back then on the market place in Eisenkappel, before he was arrested, before he was taken to Klagenfurt and then to Vienna to be beheaded in the Civil Court building. Tavčman had been wearing a white shirt with his collar unbuttoned and had predicted to the people around him that he would be executed. That went straight to the marrow, they knew there was no return, Father tells me.
When I come home next time, I could cut your hair, I say rashly.
But only if I want, Father says looking attentively at the passersby through the window. He is in no rush to rejoin the rest of the family.
Do you like it here in Vienna, he suddenly wants to know. I say yes but am not sure if I should start telling him about it. I merely tell him that I’ll probably have to leave the city soon. Aha, Father says. We should probably go, shouldn’t we? Let’s go, I say and hand him his jacket.
That night Father tells me his head has turned into a furnace. He smelts his headaches like stones to liquefy them, but not with heat, with glacial patience instead. He has an extra attachment on the back of his head, a second skull that slides over the first and is attached to his temples with bandages. I wonder if I should draw Father’s attention to his double head, but then he turns his everyday face towards me. Don’t say anything that will make him worry, I think, or his head will fall off. He wouldn’t survive.
On the second night Father has a choking fit. He says the air has gotten trapped in his brain. He can’t get enough oxygen. I lay him on his side on the ground and hold my hand under his temple. In a haze of sleep, I imagine that the pain begins to glitter in Father’s corpus callosum and gradually changes color. Pain crystals line the wrinkles of his brain and create an agonizing foam determined to attack every nerve in his body. At fever pitch, the pain finally loses strength and ebbs away. Later, when its glow has hardened, I will extract it from Father’s cellular tissue, that is what I think or dream. I will scrape the crystallized blood clots, the copper-colored sponge from my father’s brain.
MY DEPARTURE from Vienna is sudden. Since my scholarship has run out, I decide to finish writing my dissertation in Carinthia. Back home, I store my tableware and the few pieces of furniture I have acquired in my parents’ attic in the hope that I’ll be able to use them elsewhere soon. The valley’s trap snaps shut again.
Now that I’m back in Carinthia, my mother makes her own plans. She thinks it’s time for me to take over the responsibilities for the family. She could work as a cleaning woman in Klagenfurt and start a new life, she says. She has endured her marriage long enough, the time comes when enough is enough. As always, she describes Father’s episodes in minute detail as if she wanted to explain yet again her reasons for leaving. You’ve had the chance to study, now you have to be ready to pay the price, she concludes. The minute the two of us are alone, she turns to me, a sorrowful goddess of vengeance. For years I’ve been dreaming only of snakes, she says, vipers and adders wherever I look. They follow me and creep over me. They’ve already built nests inside me. I can no longer get rid of the poison my husband has poured over me. To make me give in, Mother pelts me with her despair, her bitterness and rage. Her new plans begin to look like an attack on me. I wake with a start in the middle of the night and fight against emotions that pretend to be adult but are as needy as young children. Shadow-boxing. Spirits from the primordial soup that set upon me. I no longer know what it is I am trying to ward off, I feel threatened, and have no idea what to do with my agitation. How could things have gone so far? Why does Mother see me as an adversary?
When I was a child, my mother was brash, always a bit harried and angry, although she could hide the inner tumult that was connected to my father and grandmother. Occasionally I heard her sobbing, more often singing, and her voice, from near and from afar, sounded like my own, as if the sobs and the songs were coming from me and Mother were speaking with my body. Her feelings were our secret. When I started school, her expressions of emotions dwindled, as did her tears. She withdrew into her work, into her own ideas that culminated in the conviction that one must bear one’s fate like a stigma. Once she told me that the Virgin Mary had warned her against marrying my father. She had noticed, while praying, that the statue of the Madonna was crying. From that moment, she suspected she was making a mistake, but it was too late to turn back. Mother seems to revel in the stories of the martyrs and lives of the saints with their stigmata and wounds. The sensuality she tries to repress finds its own means of expression. She has the habit of laughing very loud and inappropriately, of singing almost shrilly in church, and of coughing noisily. I cannot accept her extravagant behavior in public when she demands such discipline and discretion of us at home. On the weekends I spent at home while still in school, I would open her wardrobe and stand in the waves of scent that streamed from her clothing. I felt her underwear and her stockings, examined the embroidered tablecloths, handkerchiefs and pillowcases she kept in a chest like a fairy-tale princess with a hidden treasure. I am avid for her praise, but if I mention it she says that work well done is its own reward and doesn’t warrant extra attention. Sometimes, when we are screaming at each other, Mother ends the argument by saying that she doesn’t see why she should be more affectionate towards her children when no one in this house is ever kind to her or pays her any attention. Once I have accepted the fact that Father is to blame for Mother’s hardness, I stop pestering her. Although we write each other once a month when I’m at university and she always tells me what she is busy with or what is new at home, this does not bring us any closer because Mother envies my freedom, she both admires and condemns it and reproaches me for being too understanding towards Father. She stops asking how I am.
When I move to Vienna, she starts reading literature and puts aside her Catholic horror stories. She reads historical novels, travel writing, books about the Second World War, but also Tolstoy, Flaubert, Lipuš, and Handke. Right now, I’m giving modern literature a try and I find it puzzling, she writes in a letter, but at least I’d like to give it a try. She never had the chance to go to school, but it would have interested her, she writes. She starts writing poetry and gives me her rhymed verses to correct when I come home on vacation. She believes that in life you have to pull yourself together and write stories with endings. It’s also important that morality has pride of place because where would things lead if there was no one to show us how things could be.
When Grandmother was alive, Mother was almost never able to talk about herself. She sat next to those telling stories from the past and was never asked for her own. Her family’s stories were considered insignificant, nothing very bad happened to her mother during the war, it was said, of course she’d had to raise her children alone as a day laborer, but that was nothing unusual. In the Slovenian convent school where Mother completed a one-year home economics course, they drummed into her head that she must only read chaste, pious books and never pick up the works of depraved writers. Such reading could corrupt a young girl, she was told. She must not read the Slovenian weekly newspaper Slovenski vestnik, which the Catholic Church had proscribed because it extolled the partisan tradition. A Slovenian-Carinthian should wear a headscarf whenever possible and not watch any Errol Flynn movies. Very few of the students must have followed these precepts, but my mother wanted to lead a model Catholic life.
Everything seemed to go wrong from the beginning. She remained chaste, certainly, but not long enough. She followed the injunction to marry the first man who approached her, but the reality of marriage fell short of her expectations. Even her children, not long after they were toddlers, developed minds of their own, which left my mother angry and disillusioned. She observed the virtues of temperance and frugality, and not being able to follow the latest fashions made no difference to her. Because there was no money in our household to buy a car and, in any case, she believed a fast vehicle would be too dangerous for Father, she settled for a moped and drove it
to church, to do her errands, on outings and visits with her friends. She and her moped became inseparable and sometimes, when I saw her returning from her rides, it seemed to me she was recapturing her lost youth. Her eyes shone, her strong, weather-beaten hands were bursting with energy. She looked like a bold young woman for whom her children were pests and her husband a failure.
Mother has decided to wage one last battle with me because she instinctively feels that I am not on strong footing. She bets everything on the maternal card and loses because, in truth, she never was and never could be vindictive. She abandons her plan to move to Klagenfurt and holds me responsible. I should be aware, she tells me, that it’s only for my sake that she’s staying in this miserable situation.
Father, on the other hand, shows his sympathy. When I see him in public and he has, as we say, assuaged his thirst and then some, he proclaims, almost shouting, so that everyone can hear, that one’s mine, she’s a dear one! Since our tractor ride through the frigid winter night, he has turned the Hitler salute into our secret, almost intimate, handshake. If he’s in a good mood, he greets me with “Heil Hitler” and takes a perverse glee in the bystanders’ reactions. He lets me cut his hair and, as soon as he thinks it’s time for another cut, he sets a chair in front of the house, lays a towel over his shoulders, and smiles contentedly when I take his thin hair between my fingers.
His phases of exhaustion are ever more obvious. Ever since he almost lost his left eye in a work accident in the forest, his injuries have been multiplying. He slashes his index finger with a saw, he opens a gash in his leg with an ax. He wants to keep up the frantic and agile pace at which he had always worked and is distressed that he no longer has the necessary strength or stamina. He is diagnosed with emphysema, which he refuses to admit because he does not want to give up cigarettes. Smoking is his elixir of life, he claims. Some days he feels the same as he did back then, in the forest, famished and exhausted after running for days on end, when his companions would give him dried leaves to smoke. That’s the only thing that got him back on his feet, he’s not going to give it up now. The only concession he’s willing to make is agreeing to smoke filtered cigarettes. That will slow the disease a bit, he thinks.
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