Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  As my parents’ argument swells, I leave the house.

  I drive slowly down the access road.

  The property has plunged into darkness. The forest seems to be slipping into the depths, the rushing of the stream is interspersed with tiny needles that prick my ears. When I pass the covered cow, I stop but do not get out of the car.

  At night I dream that the valleys and slopes are turned inward towards the mountain’s core, like the lining of a coat. The darkness that surrounded me on the way to town persists in the mountains. Daylight is concentrated in small suns, which, as I am aware, occasionally bathe everything in a glittering light and then retreat. They hang in the firmament like weightless yellow balls. I’m in a hurry to get home because something terrible has happened. I know that mother is in the sitting room and could help me. I want to find her and yank open the door. A horrifying creature lunges at me, half-girl, half-lizard. I fling it against the side of the house, against the cliffs, against the mountain. I call for Mother, but she remains distant. When I can no longer move my feet, I start to hover and float into the void.

  MY parents decide to sell their last cow. Father comes down with pneumonia and does not leave the house for two weeks. It has all hit him to the marrow, Mother says. They have decided to stop raising animals, they have to stick to the most essential, to what they can still manage, she says.

  Father’s lungs are slowly deteriorating and his weight dwindles along with his breath. After he has recovered from the bout of pneumonia, his upper body resembles a beetle’s carapace, from which protrudes a head drawn in between his shoulders and two arms and two legs similar to an insect’s slender limbs. Father’s fragile rib cage presses against his crooked spine like a wicker basket. His steps grow shorter and slower. The lines in his face are rough furrows. Bones are Father’s most striking feature, his knobby knees, his thin, sinewy forearms, his exhausted fingers. The distances he is still able to cover grow shorter and his outings less frequent. He hesitates for a long time before gathering his strength to go into the forest to chop firewood, repair a fence, or drive the sheep that have replaced the cows into their pens. Before long he needs to stop and rest in the middle of the courtyard when he goes to get his hard cider from the cellar or to check on his ailing bee colonies and he has to double over because he’s lost his breath. We try to persuade him to carry the portable oxygen tank, to which he is hooked up in the evening, since it would make it easier for him to walk, but he refuses to give in to his weakness, as if it were beneath his dignity. Sometimes, when he feels ill, he holds on to one of the plum trees that border the courtyard.

  In the penultimate year of his life, Father receives a payment from the newly founded Austrian National Fund for Victims of National Socialism, a symbolic reparation. Most of all, he is pleased that his suffering has been recognized. He wants to use the money to fix the tractor, he says. If he puts it off much longer, the tractor will die before he does.

  In the spring, he makes his last careful attempts to prune the apple tree and remove the branches broken under the weight of the snow. He is like a wizened child who would like to spend the entire day up in a tree, but has to climb down the ladder so as not to risk a fall. In early summer, he must admit defeat and stay in bed. He is hooked up to a breathing device. Without oxygen he can just barely manage to go to the toilet or take a bath. Mother and my brother have moved his bed to the sitting room so he can take part in daily life and visitors can comfortably sit with him and not have the feeling they are in a sick room. Medications pile up on the side table Mother has placed next to his bed. Father abhors being taken care of by Mother, but Mother has decided she will nurse him. Whether or not he wants her to, whether or not she wants to, she believes it is her duty to endure the closeness necessitated by his illness.

  Father suffers a great deal. His face is slightly swollen from the medication, his hands, in contrast, have become softer and more delicate. When he sits up in bed, he looks at us like someone who is smiling as he drowns, holding his head above water in the certainty that he will soon go under. He doesn’t want to sign over his property, he’s at a loss, he says in response to my urging, he sees no future for his holding and doesn’t want to think about the decline of his farm. It’s up to us to work out an agreement after his death.

  He begins to take an interest in my work and asks questions, what it is I do in the theater, what does a dramaturge do, he asks if I earn enough money, if the public in Carinthia likes our work. Once he informs me that he watched a production of Nabucco on television. A broadcast from the National Opera, Father says, the National Opera in Vienna! In one scene, photographs of murdered Viennese Jews were held up on signs. He thought that was a good idea, just think, Viennese Jews, he says.

  When we sit around the old farm table on Sundays and spoon up our noodle soup, he looks at us, shakes his head and says with feigned seriousness, you’re all half-wits, a bunch of half-wits! Our soup spoons pause in the air for a moment. I can’t help but guffaw, which particularly pleases him, all the more since it makes Mother grimace.

  Father only becomes lively when his cousins visit. He even lets his careless relatives persuade him to play the accordion, which completely exhausts him. But what won’t we do to cheat illness a bit, he tells himself, even if all that’s left of him after the exuberant celebration is a pained grin which he forces himself to maintain with great effort. He can no longer play cards, but he likes to watch his sons and neighbors play. On weekends he asks Bertl, his successor in hunting, to tell him what’s new in the hunting ground, what animals have been seen leaving the forest to graze, or what they plan to do to contain the game browsing.

  One day Father’s cousin Kati comes to visit. She is preparing a song recital with Mother. The women created a duo to present their own poems set to music, Marian songs, and partisan songs.

  Like Kati, Mother has begun setting her poems to music and dreams of publishing them in a book. I’d like to have my own book someday, she says, pushing a few of her texts or poems across the table for me to read.

  When I ask Father how he’s doing that day, he says, how do you think I’m doing? I’ve been listening to those two women practicing next to me for two hours. It’s not exactly uplifting.

  With your voices, you’re going to scare away the audience, he sneers. After such howling, the crowd will have thinned out. Enough out of you, button your lip, Kati tells him. Shall we sing something for you?

  Yes, Father says impishly, he’d like to hear Katrca’s song again. The women stand at the foot of his bed and start singing: Pihljaj vetrič mi hladan doli na Koroško plan, tam, kjer dom moj prazen zdaj stoji, hiti tja oj vetrič ti! Ne bom njegovega več vinca pil, v njegovi senci se ne bom hladil, njegove njive ne bom več oral, le nesi zadnji mu pozdrav! Ko boš izpolnil mojo mi željo, takrat, o vetrič, mene večne bo. Življenje svoje sem že dokončal. Bom v tuji zemlji mirno spal. Oh, dear cool breeze, blow towards the fields of Carinthia, where my house stands empty, alas, hurry, dear breeze. Never again will I drink wine, never again will the shadow of my house cool me, never again will I plow my field. Carry my final greeting with you! As soon as you have granted me my final wish, dear wind, I will be no more. I will have ended my life and will lie at peace in foreign ground.

  Father is satisfied. After sitting down, Kati says she always gets tears in her eyes when she sings that song because it makes her think of Katrca and of her dead mother, Urša, who was Katrca’s sister. Before Katrca died, she had sent the poem from the Ravensbrück concentration camp with the request that Urša set it to music so it wouldn’t be forgotten. Her mother composed a melody for the poem, Kati explains. She set many poems to music, mostly her own. And yet her mother couldn’t even write, she was illiterate. She composed the poems in her head while working in the fields all day and then dictated them to her husband in the evening. That’s how her plays, stories, and poems came to be. Her mother was the real poet in the family, a better poet than she herself is, Kati says,
that much she has to admit, though she has written a lot recently.

  Our family is a poet’s nest, it’s enough to make you lose your mind, Father says giving Mother and me a mischievous look. In our family it’s like the annual fair, one poet after another, you can barely escape all the poems. Besides, he wrote a poem himself, when he was twelve years old, with the partisans. He can remember one stanza, Father says: Ko pasel sem jaz kravce, je prišel policist, v oreh me je obesil in mislil, da sem list. As I was taking the cows to pasture, a policeman came and hung me from the walnut tree. He thought I was foliage. Father sits on his bed and grins.

  IN late autumn, Father’s body is caught in a vice of pain that squeezes him mercilessly. His struggle to live frays our nerves. We can hardly bear the thought of his suffering and we start to resent the family doctor who stops by regularly for not being able to alleviate his pain. Father absolutely refuses to go to the hospital, he wants to die at home, that is his express wish, he tells us. By now he can barely move, can hardly sit up anymore. He must relieve himself lying down. He’s not happy about it, but now and then he has to groan loudly, he says, the pain is too great. Every touch is torture and our helpless hands that want to soothe him are a punishment.

  Relatives and neighbors come to visit, saying they want to chat with him. They bring wine because Father once said that he’d like to drink a glass or two every day. It’s necessary, he claims. More than anything, he’d like to drink a whole bottle of plum schnapps, if he were certain he could handle it.

  I very much want Father to be able to die at peace, but he is far from reconciled to what’s coming. I even imagine that he’s asking for help when he looks at me. One day he says, in my room there’s a notebook of Mici’s in my night table drawer. Take it. It’s for you. I stop myself from asking if the thought that he might have betrayed Mici when the police were beating her up has been tormenting him. He has never spoken of Mici, but he kept the notebook. Why do I not ask? Does his agitation have something to do with Mother, with whom he has had a marriage filled with rancor and strife? Would he like to reconcile with her and does he lack the energy to do so? Is his fear a last rebellion against the loss of life that he experiences as a pitiful remnant within or is there something unspoken, something older that’s choking him? I will never know.

  On January 3rd, on his birthday, we will drink a glass of wine with Father.

  Three days later, his face will turn pale and bloodless. He will tell me that yesterday, on his name day, his cousins had come to visit. They had laughed and sung, it was a circus, he says. The celebration wore him out so completely, he’ll probably die. In the meantime, I should go and look at how many bottles of wine were given as gifts. I go to the backroom and count the bottles. Thirty-three, I say. Well, I’ll have to live a long while yet, Father says with a forced smile.

  The next morning, my brother calls to tell me Father is dead. He passed away in the early morning hours.

  When I arrive home, Father is laid out on the sickbed in his black suit. Mother washed and dressed his body. She stands up from the sick bed when I enter the room and she gestures towards him with her hand. Here he is, she says, weeping. He has finished with it all.

  The community gives us permission to lay Father out at home. A last exception.

  When the casket is delivered, Pepi comes and pauses on the doorstep to recite an ancient farewell prayer, which he is now the last to know. Pepi helps my brother set up the trestles for the bier under the south-facing windows in the sitting room. Father is laid in the casket and lifted onto the bier. I comb his hair for the last time. Touching his head, it feels like I am caressing a stone. Mother interlaces Father’s fingers and places a cross in his folded hands.

  The casket with the corpse is bathed in a white, winter morning light. The sitting room is like a wide ship drifting slowly on the open sea: the glittering light, the muted sounds of daily life, the whispering in the kitchen, the silent weeping, the sunlight reflected on the snow, the brownish violet spots on Father’s forearms, the white of the shroud, the crocheted lace border, the open door, the whining of the dog on its chain outside that has caught the scent of death, the unhurried movements, the open tenderness, long desired and no longer willing to be masked.

  The room is not yet filled with mourners, with flowers or wreaths or candles, we still have time to draw the deceased near in order to release him again. No one knows when he or she will take leave of the deceased, but they each engage in this hidden act. I use the pauses between prayers and the hours in which only one or two mourners linger in the room to observe Father’s lifeless form, his milky yellow skin, his sunken eyes. He seems to have frozen in his last moment and to have been seized with fear. He looks as if he were holding in his last breath, as if he had frozen this breath, put it aside, retaining it for later, for some other time.

  Over the next two days, people stream into the house to say goodbye to Father. We are busy serving the visitors, who in turn help us keep our countenance.

  On the evening before the burial, Mother sits next to me by the casket. She places her hand on my thigh without a word and leans her shoulder against mine, a sisterly gesture. Has she returned to me as a sister, I wonder, and I try to give her a hug. It’s all fine, I say when she stands up and returns to the kitchen.

  The day of Father’s funeral, the pallbearers come at an early hour. They are the hunters from Lepena. We share some soup near the deceased whose casket has been closed. Pepi recites the ancient prayer again. The coffin is lifted out through the living room window and is laid on the doorstep. The deceased is encouraged to take leave of his home and his family. With slow steps, they carry him across the courtyard and again he’s encouraged to bid farewell to his fields, pastures, and slopes.

  As the gravediggers lower Father into the pit after Mass and the coffin is laid in the ground, I believe I hear an exhalation that comes either from me or from the casket. An exhalation emitted straight from a small, dark throat and echoing far and wide. Shocked, I look into the grave. Is it my breath or Father’s, is it my relief that I finally have his loss behind me or is it Father’s blocked, conserved, gagging breath now drawing in air, finally released from any restraints and floating away?

  So be it, so be it, I think on the drive back to the city.

  I DREAM that the region I am fleeing is frozen. The sky is a glacier in which the valley appears like a mirage. Fissures of light streak through the frozen surface like crystalline borders. A frozen carapace of air has enclosed the valley beneath it and is constricting it. Crabs, snails, jellyfish, leeches, worms, and mottled amphibians crawl across the surface of the ice. The water that has lain like a coat of crystal over the hills, the trees, and the properties, that nestled, supple and light, protectively against everything, now begins to move. In the next moment, at the slightest breath of wind, I think, it will evaporate, blow away, scatter, and drain away. Nothing can remain the way it is.

  Later I hear a rushing sound growing ever louder coming from the valley and suddenly I see the water beginning to rise. I say to my brother, come on, we have to go, we have to leave the house! We hurry to the forest, above the slope with the old plum trees, as we did when Father chased us with his shotgun. We watch the house fill with water, we hear the orebodies collapse deep within the massive mountain. The mineral deposits are used up, nothing more will be extracted, the tunnels are flooded. Then the water drains away and we return to our home. Water stains and smears of dirt line the walls, the flood has left its mark. The windows are closed and the panes of glass intact. I am amazed that the windows could withstand the mass of water and tell my brother, we have to clean up, we have to clean it all up!

  AFTER Father’s funeral, my mind sinks into a stupor.

  Standing by his grave, I return to the familiar silence, to the leaving of things unsaid that had always characterized our conversations.

  At home we sit across from one another, each of the siblings bearing the weight of their own father, each
one with a father figure hanging around their neck and we stare at each other, tired from carrying our father’s weight, exhausted by the stories and the memories that always sound like reproaches when we recount them to each other, you have no idea what Father and I, and so on. And this, too, the various echoes and feelings, the different acts of rebellion, grief mixed with disappointment.

  Mother has reached a nadir in her state of exhaustion that has lasted months, if not years, and she wanders through the house high-strung and irritable. She believes she has gotten through the worst, that she has reached an ending. She feels responsible for everything and is convinced that we, who have witnessed her efforts, don’t appreciate them enough. She accompanied Father to his death. His last glance was directed at her, she says and shivers with horror at the thought of all that cannot be solved or expressed.

  And I, child of my child-father, ridiculous, simply ridiculous to chain myself and my life to the past, to old suffering because of him, to jeopardize my life, and would like to leave it all untouched, to push away all that is repressed, all that obligates and burdens me. It should all be left undisturbed for a time, I decide, to age on its own.

  But I am not left in peace. In forgetful Carinthia, I learn how to be unable to forget. The ground on which I stand must have an invisible underside that is saturated with what has been, from which I seem to grow and onto which I am always thrown back. Again and again, the region falls prey to a kind of vertigo in which it claims a version of history that is nothing more than a phantom justification through which it believes itself on the right side. All those crushed under the wheels of National Socialism are excluded from this self-image.