Poachers Road

by John Brady

  There was a smell of fresh paint coming from the house. The windows were still open. Felix gathered the straps of his sports bag tighter, anxious to avoid crushing the flowers he was trying to hold aside from the straps, or the stuff from the supermarket. The dog moved on slowly and crookedly to the door without him, and then turned with a look of short-sighted curiosity and an awkward shrug of sorts.

  Felix took in the deep overhanging eaves and the window boxes, and the stacked wood that ran in a line back up the vegetable garden toward the orchard. Behind the washing stirring slowly on the clothesline were the hills that lay between here and the highlands of the Teichalm.

  Oma Nagl’s mania for washing clothes remained as strong as ever. She particularly liked to whack carpets and rugs, and heartily too, and had initiated Felix into the rug-whacker world when he was very small. It had always been so. Other memories eddied back to him now as he closed in on the doorway: Oma Nagl with her own sisters and neighbours in the yard on benches, like some African tribe, peeling and slicing turnips. It didn’t matter if it were gooseberries, apples, potatoes, turnips: she needed to be busy, to be in rhythm. She could as easily have lived the same ways of centuries ago.

  In the yard was their old Opel, a vehicle that was rarely seen without a trailer or a roof-rack loaded with something. The need to replace parts only seemed to intensify Opa Nagl’s stubborn attachment to it, and the brand generally. Some years ago, Opa Nagl had made a run at Vienna with it, but had given up when the traffic began to surround him more and more approaching the city.

  “That car has been to Vienna,” he would say. “Almost. But it knew when to stop. Better than any of those electronic things they put all over the cars now.”

  A cat new to Felix was prowling in the yard, but the stationary fat one, Mitzi, was in her usual spot. She had always looked malignant, perhaps because she so seldom moved but merely glared with that negligent but somehow lethal detachment Felix had always read into her expression.

  He saw tools on the ground near the tractor. Opa Nagl stepped out of the shed with a hesitant step, examining something, and looked over at the dog’s slowing antics.

  “A senile dog,” he called out. “He won’t even bark. Servus Felix and how are you?”

  Felix smiled and laid down his bags. His grandfather’s knuckles seemed to be even more misshapen by the arthritis.

  “You look worn out,” said Felix’s opa. “Mein Gött, what the hell kind of shitty life are you leading now?”

  It had always been so with Opa Nagl’s language, and Felix’s mother had long tired of trying to explain it. Farm talk, she used to call it, when Felix and Lisi were small. As they grew, she said it was perhaps psychological, or maybe a need to embarrass others.

  “Who knows,” said Felix. “But they call it a job.”

  Opa Nagl narrowed his glance.

  “Hmm. I could guess,” he said, and winked. “A row. But don’t tell me. It’s great you’re here and you’ll get peace and quiet up here, I can tell you that.”

  “You should have been a psychiatrist, Opa.”

  Felix looked over pieces of the power-take-off assembly that his grandfather had taken apart, and then around the yard.

  “Your oma is visiting down in the village. She’ll be along.”

  His grandfather let his glasses back down from the top of his head, and with a soft sigh went down on one knee to examine the gearing.

  “Only a couple of pigs now, Felix,” he said. “We rent out the fields again.”

  “You’ll always have the speck. Nonnegotiable.”

  “I wonder,” Opa Nagl grunted. “They’ll have that coming in from Bulgaria or Romania, or China, next. And you know what? It’ll be one tenth of the price, and it’ll taste better.You’ll see.”

  “Aber geh weg: get out of here, Opa.You’re talking treason there.”

  His grandfather squinted up at him. For a few moments Felix wondered if he had actually annoyed him.

  “Don’t you city slickers read the paper?”

  He held the wrench out straight, like a fencer, pointed at the fields and hills.

  “Gerade aus,” he declared. “Straight ahead, go like hell to the future. That’s a train that makes no stops, Felix. Mark my words.”

  “Globalization, isn’t that what they call it?”

  Opa Nagl grunted as he put more pressure on a turn of the wrench.

  “Wait for this Constitution thing,” he said. “We’ll show them.”

  Then he groaned, cursed, and let down the wrench. He massaged his hand.

  “Let me.”

  “Leave it, Felix. I broke it, I’ll fix it. Okay? It’s the stupid fingers and knuckles that need a wrench.”

  Slowly he stood, and drew out a rag from the back pocket of his overalls. His father used to joke that Opa Nagl had arrived in the world in the same blue overalls, cursing, that it had been this way since day one.

  He watched his grandfather wipe his hands, holding them out one by one, stretching them. Those are claws now, he thought, not hands.

  “What’ve you got there?”

  “Just a few things, for the kitchen.”

  “What? Flowers for your oma? And . . . ? You want a bite to eat, are you peckish?”

  Felix shook his head. He looked around the yard.

  “Just a bit of peace and quiet, right?” said Opa Nagl. “The way things used to be.”

  “Something like that I guess.”

  Opa fixed him with a mischievous eye.

  “Did I hear something there maybe?”

  Felix pulled out two bottles.

  “Prima. It’s been a long day. But stay out here, the house stinks of paint.”

  They strolled over to the edge of the cement area Felix had helped lay while he was still in school. The pigs heard them and began shuffling about in the pen.

  Berndt flopped down beside them and soon lay his snout flat over his paws, staring too, Felix imagined, at the faraway hills to the south. There was a slight glow to the sky there, broadening as Felix turned and looked over the house toward the West.

  “Your father sat here, the same as you. Damn. My big mouth.”

  Felix drank from the bottle again.

  “I’m sorry,” Opa Nagl went on. “It’s probably the last thing you want to hear.”

  Then, after a while, he spoke again.

  “Only that it reminds me of him. He never showed up emptyhanded. What a man he was and you too. You’re not a complete loss to the city I mean.”

  Felix smiled.

  “Do you really believe that old stuff, Opa? Stadtleute and g’scherter, the city people and the country people stuff?”

  “What if I do? Is that not allowed?”

  Felix shrugged.

  “Even if I don’t believe it, plenty do. Why else do we have the Freedom Party?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m a Green.”

  “How can you be a Green and a policeman? That I don’t get.”

  Felix eyed him.

  “Okay,” Opa said. “So I have these rules in my head. But everyone does.”

  “But all that country versus city stuff, it’s so, I don’t know, so ancient.”

  “You think so?”

  “The Internet, Opa. Osama Bin Laden. Mobile phones.

  Turkey, the EU.”

  “Jesus and Mary, you came all the way up here from Graz to educate your elders?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Wait until I tell our ancient Oma. She’ll take a wooden spoon to you hell, forget it, she’ll take a shovel to you, kid. She’s down with the Wagners there, down the hill a way. You talk about ‘ancient’? She’s been best friends with that Frieda since they were spots. Well kindergarten. And you know what? Their mothers were friends too. It all goes back.”

  Felix drained the bottle and he began to study the label.

  “Maybe you went to school with that Oetzi guy, did you?”

  “Oetzi? I don’t know any Oetzi. Otto, I know
. Otto Biedermeier?”

  “Oetzi the Iceman. Remember the one they found high up, just across in Italy? Preserved, in the ice?”

  A sardonic expression took over Opa Nagl’s face.

  “Him,” he murmured. “The archaeology people? I get it now.

  Of course. Yes, he was on his way over the mountains to see me when he croaked.”

  Felix glanced over, and grinned.

  Opa Nagl seemed ageless. He still had the schoolboy’s vitality and mischief close to the surface. For a moment Felix imagined his opa striding over the moors in the high mountains six thousand years ago, grumbling that his friend Oetzi was late again. Then, maybe finding Oetzi curled up just as he was when a hill-walker was to find him in 1992 half encased in the ice, what would he do, or say? Maybe standing over the unresponsive, curled-up figure, Opa might berate him for losing his way: Oetzi, you clumsy clown! I’m leaving you here so someone can find you in thousands of years, a monument to the Earliest Austrian Idiot. And the figure of Opa Nagl, hill farmer, prodigious farter, mechanic and joker, would move on across the high passes, the blue overalls visible thousands of metres away to the prehistoric peoples who would deem him a god.

  “What? What is so funny?”

  “Just thinking old times.”

  Opa’s face showed his skepticism.

  “Ach so? Well don’t do it, kid. That’s not a family heirloom you should accept.”

  Felix watched his grandfather swallow more beer.

  “By all means, keep the good stuff,” he added then.

  “What would that be?”

  “What I said,” said his grandfather, turning serious. “Your dad.

  He had a big heart. Never let anyone . . .”

  And he turned away. After humming awhile a sign he was restless, annoyed or wanted out, Felix knew he turned back. He had a gentle expression now.

  “Come on Felix.You are a grown man.You know me.You know more about the world already than we ever will. Don’t listen to an old goat like me. It’s strange how the feelings linger. It must be the anniversary, all that it brings it back.”

  “I never had anyone say, or suggest, anything about Dad, Opa.”

  The crease between his grandfather’s eyebrows was anger more than bewilderment.

  “Of course not. Why are you even saying that?”

  “Heirloom, what does that mean?”

  “I have a big mouth, that’s what it means. See this beer? You brought this on.”

  Felix waited but his grandfather shook his head and muttered.

  An uneasy silence settled between them. Felix began to feel tired, aching even. The events of the day began to roll through his mind like a silent movie, stopping at Speckbauer’s face with its halfsarcastic lift of the eyebrow and that knowing look, then to his voice with the studied courtesy and fake warmth.

  “Too much,” he muttered.

  “Too much what?”

  “Too much in one day. I’m tired.”

  “Good. It’s the mountain air. It means you are relaxed, like the weeks you used to spend with us. Christ, but we had fun! Like a couple of pranksters. Remember the tractor you nearly rolled there in the high field?”

  In the distance they heard the occasional car coming up the hill. There wasn’t a breath of wind. They made their way to the old bench by the wall, and soon another beer was opened. Felix no longer felt the chill of the evening air up here. They stared down the valley, the jokes and conversation now done, and Felix remembered how quiet his grandfather was when he got the few anecdotes and gossip out of the way.

  “Come on,” said his grandfather, we’ll go in. Your oma will be home. A bit of dinner better be on the table.”

  Felix took his time getting up. He found his grandfather’s eyes on him.

  “You’re going to bed early, I am thinking, no?”

  “I’ll pick up steam, Opa.”

  “You’re looking broody to me. Have forty winks anyway.”

  Felix sighed and stretched.

  “You have that one-hundred-kilometre look all right. What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  “It’s so different here, I had almost forgotten.”

  “That’s what the city does.”

  “Nothing changes up here, it feels like.”

  His grandfather gave him a look.

  “Your mother said the exact same thing. A million times she couldn’t wait, you know.”

  “But she came back, didn’t she?”

  “For your dad’s sake, Felix. Not to say she was not happy here.

  If he was happy, that made her happy. That’s what love is, Felix.

  Who knows, but you will find that too.”

  “Opa.You and Dad got along. Right?”

  “Christ, natürlich, we did! And how. He was like my own son.”

  “Did he, well, did he talk to you about work at all?”

  “Work, like the Gendarmerie? No. Why would he?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “You need some advice about work? Ask Edelbacher. He knows everything.”

  “It’s not that. I just wondered if you and he talked about stuff.”

  “Of course we did! But what stuff? Like, how to change the oil in that stupid tractor?”

  “I meant, well, when he went around the place.”

  Opa Nagl’s frown wasn’t unfriendly, Felix understood.

  “You have things on your mind all right,” he said. “Not just that nice girl.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “It’s all over your face. But your father, it’s the anniversary.Yes that’s it.”

  “I heard how he was well liked and all, and how everyone knew him, or met him, at least.”

  “And isn’t that good? They mean it, Felix.”

  Felix thought about another beer.

  “Well, have you been to Slovenia and places?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Why do you answer a question with a question?”

  Opa Nagl smiled.

  “Because I’m from up here. Because you’re a Gendarme. How do you like that?”

  “I was just curious. Somebody asked me. I was thinking about it. That’s all.”

  “Asked you what?”

  “If we went to Slovenia or Croatia or those places. Our family.”

  “What, holidays, the beach thing?”

  “I suppose. I don’t know really.”

  “This strong beer for you, maybe?”

  It was Felix’s turn to smile. He felt his grandfather’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Why are we sitting here like two idiots? None of that brooding, like, well – let’s go in.”

  “Like who?”

  “No, nobody.”

  “You mean Mom.”

  “Did I say that? Your mother is a gentle girl, not a broody type.

  Quiet.”

  “Who then?”

  “Who who! Christ am I hearing the owl here? Never mind.”

  Then it came to Felix.

  “You mean Opa Kimmel, don’t you?”

  His grandfather looked at the house as though it had recently arrived here.

  “That beer is turned out to be expensive for me,” he said.

  “Political stuff, is it?”

  “You think he was the only one up here? Come on now, Felix.

  You grew up not two kilometres away. Ah but I forget you and the others are wired into a different planet. The rock music, all that.

  “Right. U2.”

  “What U2? A submarine is it? Or a name for drugs?”

  “Music.”

  “I’ll tell you about ‘music,’ kid I feel some ‘music’ coming on here soon.”

  “You are too ancient, Opa. Really.”

  “Not as ancient as some.”

  “Meaning?”

  His grandfather’s expression was one of waiting to be dared.

  “Meaning your dad’s father. There, I said it. May God forgive me.”

  “You never got
along with him, even when you and he were kids, did you?”

  But now Felix’s grandfather seemed to be weighing his words carefully, his head bobbing slowly and decisively as though counting out a precise number of words.

  “I never went up in the wald, in the forest, with those idiots, Felix. I am proud of that.”

  “What idiots?”

  “Those idiots who do you think, man?”

  “The Brauners?”

  “Say the name, Felix. Jesus. It’s sixty years ago.”

  “Hitler Youth?”

  “Yes, Hitler Youth! When I think of it my blood pressure . . .!

  Ah forget it.You and your damned beer.”

  “You were just a kid though.”

  “Enough talk. Christ on the cross, Felix, but you’ll put me in a bad mood yet. Look, I don’t want to speak poorly of anyone. Our Saviour had words for that.”

  Felix trudged across the yard after him. He heard the soft, scratching tread of the dog’s paws following.

  His grandfather stopped and turned to him.

  “I will say one thing though. I’m only telling you this because it is advice for the next generation, for when you start your family.

  That crap has an effect on a family for a long, long time. Just remember that.”

  “What does? I don’t get it.”

  His grandfather waved his arms about.

  “Call it something, I don’t know this fanaticism. Delusions, fairy-tale rubbish that ended up with, well, war. When you think about it, Christ! Their Germanic this and their Germanic that, and all the legends and crap they came up with. Bogeymen, and Wotan for God’s sake. Superstitious nonsense and this in a country that does science and music the best in the world? You should empty your head of this stuff. It’s like a snake or something, the more you look at it, the more it . . . ”

  Opa Nagl waved away the rest of his words, and made a sound that was more like a grunt than a sigh.

  “Thank God your generation won’t have this,” he muttered.

  “And that’s why I talk about your dad with such respect. He became like a son to us. I shouldn’t say this out loud, I suppose. But he could relax when he came in our door. No, it wasn’t just he was starry-eyed over your mom. He trusted us. A good man, coming from that . . . that, I don’t have the word wait, I do: that environment.”