The war invades my nocturnal space.
Huge trucks patrol the access road to our farm. Ambulances, sirens wailing, race between a distant hospital and the invisible battlefield. The house on the high plateau has disappeared. I am homeless now, wandering throughout the land of my childhood, to which I’ve been banned.
During the day, I cling stubbornly to my poems and my scholarly writings.
At night, I sail to Libya to get Mother where she has gone for a cure. The sea is stormy and dangerous. When we dock our sailboat, I see Mother waiting on a golden throne covered with jewels. She has come down with a fever. Her health is worse than it has ever been. I am very worried about her.
IN THE so-called “commemorative year” of Austria’s annexation to the Third Reich fifty years earlier, Austria officially offers the surviving victims of National Socialism a reparations premium of 5,000 schillings.
Father’s cousin Peter comes to visit and draws his attention to the sum. Peter tells Father that he must realize he, too, is a victim of the Nazis.
What’s that supposed to mean, a victim, Father asks as if someone had tossed him a hot potato he would like to drop as quickly as possible. He’s had enough of this circus, he says. He went to Klagenfurt a few times with his mother, back then, after the War, to testify in court against the police officer who had tortured and mistreated him. The officer sat in front of him, and Father was asked if he recognized him. The officer had looked at him, and Father didn’t say a thing. He doesn’t know why not. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He thought to himself, the hell with him, I’m not saying anything.
I look at Father, astounded. What good would it have done, he asks to calm me down.
When Father receives his premium, he takes advantage of a moment when we are alone in the kitchen to whisper that he wants to spend the money only on himself. What good was all that suffering! Just to hand the money over to Mother for the household? He wants me to take my brother’s car, now that I have a driver’s license, and drive him to the dentist in Prevalje so he can get his dentures fixed.
One day in late August, I drive Father to Slovenia. The roads in the southern end of the Jaun Valley are lined with cornfields and swaths of blackened, overripe sunflowers. In the orchards, early apples rot under the trees. Wasps pursue their wild, frenzied dance over the sparse fruit. Father stretches in the passenger seat and looks at the countryside. His eyes prod the pastures and fields, as if he expected the fruit, plants, and vegetation to offer information about the length of autumn or the severity of the coming winter.
We cross the border at Bleiberg and drive to Prevalje via Poljana.
In the dentist office, there are two of his countrymen who also want to take advantage of the less expensive fees. Father says he would much rather have a Slovenian dentist rummaging around in his mouth than a Carinthian one, because Slovenians don’t run out of patience as quickly. His dentures haven’t fit properly for weeks and have been hurting him. He wants to have them fixed, finally, he can’t bear it any longer, he tells me while waiting his turn. When he is called in, I tell him I’ll wait for him in a café across the street.
Father shows up after an hour. It was rough going, he says. His bottom dentures have to be redone and it took forever to get a proper dental cast. I think we deserve a good lunch, he says, don’t you?
Before leaving Prevalje, he buys ten cartons of Yugoslavian cigarettes in the town’s largest store. Ten cartons, you really want to smuggle ten cartons across the border, I ask in surprise. Why not, he says, I have to spend the money on something. He can get the cartons past the customs officers.
Outside Prevalje, we turn onto a gravel road that rises steeply through a small forest. Higher up, we have a beautiful view of the landscape on both sides of the border. Father knows the local inn, he stopped in with his hunting friends once on the way home from Šmartno, where they had been invited on a hunt. We order pork roast and look around the small, low-ceilinged room. A few villagers sit drinking at the next table. Father gives them a nod and says that they serve a good roast pork here. A man at the next table asks if we’re from Carinthia. Yes, yes, we’re from the land of Carinthia, Father says and orders another beer. The owner joins the next table and Father and I are soon caught up in the local talk, even if we have nothing to add and don’t necessarily want to hear it either.
Father waves over the owner and tells her with a grin that he’d like to treat everyone to a round. What are you celebrating, the owner wants to know.
Nothing special, Father says. The round is on me, he calls out to the locals and smirks as if he’d just played a prank on them.
Father is relaxed when we leave the inn. It occurs to him that he could buy some tools at the Slovenian co-op in Bleiburg. The pitchforks and axes at home haven’t been in good shape for a long time.
We approach the border. He lights a cigarette. Now we’ve got to come up with some good lies, he says and coughs. After checking our passports, the Slovenian customs officer waves us through. The Austrian asks if we have anything to declare. Nothing, I tell him, but Father says, a pack of cigarettes and waves the pack under the officer’s nose.
Open the trunk, the customs officer says. Now it’s serious, I think and feel slightly lightheaded as I get out of the car. When I open the trunk, the customs officer immediately discovers the cartons of cigarettes under the wool blanket and pulls them out one by one. Our smuggling attempt fails. Father, who acknowledges ownership of the cigarettes, is called into the office. He must hand eight cartons over to customs and pay duty taxes on the remaining two. They told me I should be glad I got off so lightly, he says, porca duš, he swears as he gets back in the car. That went to hell, blast it, that really went to hell, he says and trembles as he stuffs what is left of the money in his wallet. As if I hadn’t suspected, he grumbles, the officers at Lavamünd aren’t as strict. At Holmec, they’re bored, they don’t have anything else to do. After this fiasco, he can do without the Slovenian co-op in Bleiburg, too. He wants to go straight home via Globasnitz.
During the drive home, the afternoon lends the sun a warm golden tone that plunges the Jaun valley into a limpid melancholy. The light has softened all garish tones and heralds the end of summer. I look at the Peca, our local peak, which I’m skirting in a half circle, with astonishment because its north face looks downright soft. On this side, the Peca is a big-bellied mountain, a long sloping pile of sand, overgrown with woods and green meadows. Blocs of limestone rise from its extended back giving the peak a more severe air. Small green domes and cones cluster around the Peca like young animals crowding around their mother. This is where the Alps end, here the steep white flanks lose their provocative hardness. Behind it, the landscape of tangled and intertwined hills extends like an impregnable valley of canyons and wooded domes that have lost none of their reclusive and rebellious character.
After the little village of Globasnitz that huddles up against a wooded slope on the southern edge of the Jaun Valley, we turn onto a narrow gravel road to the Luscha saddle pass that the locals use as a supply road. This single lane road is making me uneasy, and I pray the entire way that no vehicle will come from the opposite direction. Father senses my worry and to reassure me, tells me not to be afraid, he often drove this road on his motorcycle without lights and he always made it home. What should we do with the rest of the day, he mutters. We could stop for at bite at the Riepl, if Flortsch is at home. What do you think?
After we leave the pastures on the Luscha behind and pass the ecumenical church that Flortsch had built by the side of the road and that always rises into view unexpectedly like a rockslide, we see our neighbor Johi Čemer in front of the church. He waves us over.
I stop and get out of the car with Father. Johi laughs. What has dragged you up this way? He’s just making his daily rounds, Johi tells us and offers his hand. Father tells him about the dentist and that customs confiscated eight cartons of cigarettes. Goddamn customs, goddamn it, he says and sp
its.
Grinning, Johi says he’s glad he quit. Now that he doesn’t have to worry about cigarettes any more, his lungs work like well-oiled pumps, he can go up and down the mountains as often as he’d like without a problem. He cuts the hay by himself, does all the work in the stalls, too. He can’t complain. My engine stutters noticeably, Father says, drumming on his chest with the flat of his hand. At some point it’s going to seize up and that will be it for me. Not at all, Johi says, you’ll be around for a while yet. You’re a tough one! Just think about how much you’ve been through already. Not long ago, he was reminded of the day the police tracked them from bunker to bunker like two strays, do you still remember, Johi asks. That’s the last day he saw his father. When the police dragged him down from the forest because they’d beaten him so badly, he could hardly walk, his father came out of the stables and threw his hands in the air from sheer fright. The police wanted my father to tell them if my mother had joined the partisans. Of course he acted as if he didn’t know, then he was arrested and sent to Dachau where he died, Johi says. When he came back from the youth camp Moringen at the end of the war, everything was different; the house burned down, the stables cleaned out, half his family murdered. His mother came back sick from the partisans. The first thing we had to do in our new life was forget the old. First, learning the A B Cs of forgetting, that’s a hard school, isn’t it, Zdravko, Johi asks Father while looking at me.
Did you get money, too, my father asks.
I have a small pension because of the camp, you know that, Johi says.
Yes, of course, Father replies and repeats that he wants to get his dentures fixed with his payment. That will be it for his pocket money from the government, gone like it was nothing, he says.
To steer the conversation away from the past, I ask where the border with Yugoslavia runs. Both men stretch their right arms out and point towards the south. The border runs over that ridge there and continues behind the pasture on the other side, they answer.
In the very last days before the end of the war, he had been all over the area with partisan couriers, Father recalls. They’d been running for days from persecutors who were on their tracks. Fresh snow had fallen in late April and soldiers who were retreating from the partisans in Styria were streaming over the Luscha pass. His group had almost fallen into the hands of a few police officers who had come up from Globasnitz. He knows this area like his back pocket, Father says, but it’s covered with trees now and you can’t see the high pastures on the Luscha anymore. That’s how life is, Zdravko, Johi says, everything gets overgrown. He thinks about life when he’s alone. He wanders over the meadows and fields, looks down into the valleys or up at the mountains and is grateful that no one killed him back then. He often wonders what became of those who denounced the locals – the farmers, the women and children, the elderly – and betrayed them to the Nazis. He let the question of nationality drop on the day he and his neighbor were denounced to the police by a spy from Slovenia. The fact that a Slovenian went to the police and told them this or that one was working with the partisans, the fact that someone believed it was right to deliver people – his own people – made him even worse than the Germans who started from the principle that they were a master race and so had the right to rule over others, Johi says. He doesn’t understand how you can denounce people just because you think they’re all Communists and should be killed or something. No one needs to tell me anything, I don’t care if my children speak Slovenian or not, Johi tells us he has stopped worrying about it. It’s not my problem, he says with a smile.
Father doesn’t answer. He stares at the ground and draws on his cigarette.
Everything was settled after the war and nothing was quite right again, Johi says, that’s how he tries to see it. What Hitlerism was he understands perfectly well, and he is glad to have survived it. Sometimes, when he’s out walking, he looks at the spruce trees above the scarp. That’s where the partisans killed the farmer Keber because he supposedly had something to do with his neighbors’ deportation. It’s at moments like that that Johi prefers the worst of peacetime to war, because in wartime everyone goes insane and there’s never justice in war, not ever, Johi says.
Yes, Father sighs. His father showed the family where Keber had been buried so his body could be dug up and interred in the cemetery. Grandfather was never able to come to terms with Keber’s execution. A lot of things from his time with the partisans weighed on his mind as long as he lived, Father says. He was disillusioned after the war and loathed politics.
But neither your father nor your wife’s three uncles who died fighting with the partisans went to war to fight against Keber, they fought for something else, Johi says. I look at him, surprised, because I have never heard him talk like this before and because I am amazed to hear for the first time that three of my mother’s uncles died as partisans. Three woodcutters who decided to desert from the Wehrmacht, and no one in our family ever thought it worth including them in the family history, as if my maternal great-uncles vanished into thin air, as if they had cloaked themselves in mist so they wouldn’t be recognized or suspected of doing anything, so they could disappear from history without a trace.
Johi announces it’s time to check on his animals and gives me a kiss on the cheek. Father and I are to wait for him and then accompany him home. His wife will fix us something to eat.
Father says he’ll think about it and offers Johi his hand.
When we are alone, my father starts off towards the spruce trees above the scarp. Once we are up top, he takes a few steps to the right and to the left and circles the few trees that are scattered about the steep meadow. Climb up here, he says, I want to show you something. He comes to a stop and taps the ground with his foot. Right there, that’s where they stuffed him. From his jacket pocket he pulls a small candle he probably picked up near the church steps and lights it. When I reach him, we sit on the grass. The sycamore leaves are already changing color, Father says after a while, autumn will be here soon. We look at the valley below and are silent. The votive candle’s small flame burns behind the red glass until it imperceptibly fades.
IN MY thoughts, I follow the line of the border as it runs between the Luscha’s alpine pastures and Mount Olševa, it rises and falls, a wavy line meant to check those passing from here to there, a law written, engraved in the landscape.
Ever since I can remember, I have moved within the border’s magnetic field. Those who want to feel safe should respect the border, we are told. There is no point in retelling old stories because they could put our peace at risk. But is the peace in this region truly ours or do the languages spoken here still wear uniforms? Has peace become visible? Can a Slovenian place name stand next to a German one, a symbol more telling than a dove, a rainbow, a monument?
Because of the border, which, in the eyes of the majority of people in this country can only be a national and a linguistic border, I am forced to explain myself and declare my identity: who I am, to which group I belong, why I write in Slovenian or speak German. These declarations have a shadowy side haunted by specters with names like Loyalty and Treason, Possession and Territory, Mine and Yours. Here, crossing the border is not a natural act, it is a political act.
After I finish my dissertation and my second collection of poems appears, I move to Ljubljana. My Slovenian writer colleagues debate, dream, and talk a democratic Slovenian republic into existence that will make everyone forget the Communist decades. They want to extract the Slovenian Republic from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and lead it towards independence.
In the times of political upheaval in Slovenia, it is clear to me that I am observing the crisis as a guest, and I feel like a distant relative visiting her family after a long absence who is surprised to see that they have changed. I realize, all of a sudden, that I only know the political reality of Yugoslavia from literature, from a few personal stories and visits.
During the meetings of the writers’ association, I ask myself w
hy I feel so weak, so muted in the fight for the so-called apotheosis of the national, for the national state. Why, although I wish for the Slovenians to have their own state, with all my heart in fact, do I still hold myself at a distance? As a member of an ethnic minority, as it is so ineptly put, I have always been engaged with national questions. Why such reservation? Because the efforts made by the Slovenian speakers of Carinthia to ensure public respect for their language were directed at Austria and represented an encouragement for greater openness throughout Austria. They were not related to promoting democracy in Yugoslavia or in the independent state of Slovenia, which did not yet exist.
I experience my hesitation as a liberty but also as a loss because I don’t feel under any threat, even if I understand the political crisis and share the Slovenian writers’ goals.
In the past my family engaged with questions of nationality when they felt themselves forced to react because being part of their community put them at risk, reacting according to national lines was a matter of survival. They could either forget their language and their culture and adopt German or they could resist and suffer the disastrous consequences. They decided to join the resistance movement from Slovenia who were organizing the fight. At the time of the greatest catastrophe, they joined forces with the Slovenian segment of the European fight against Fascism. They believed in the future, in the liberation and unity of the Slovenians once they found themselves, as a result of Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany, without protection in a state that wanted to expel and annihilate them. Which Austria should they have believed in? In the one that did not exist at the time, that did not defend itself and joined in with National Socialism, that threatened one part of its citizens and delivered the other to the forces of extermination?
Angel of Oblivion Page 16