The Old King in his Exile

by Stefan Tobler

  My father would have liked to have stayed frugal his whole life. It was a deeply rooted part of his farm upbringing, and it stuck, much to the dissatisfaction of his wife and children, who had grown up in a world of disposable consumer goods. His ability to make do and mend, as well as his willingness – picked up from his parents – to delay the satisfaction of his needs, or to deny himself completely those needs: these traits belong to a culture that is disappearing.

  The large house had a still in the cellar. As a child, I would sit on an upturned bucket or a block of wood and watch the schnapps being made. I loved the crackling of the stove fire and the drip-drop trickle of alcohol as it fell into the large-bellied bottles – the aromatic scent of schnapps mixing with the smell of men working hard. And outside, the cooling marc in the ditch, the mist in the bare wintery branches of the pear tree.

  For my father and his siblings, distilling had the benefit of providing hot water. The water was fed through to a big wooden tub in the neighbouring workshop that also contained the chicken coop behind wire mesh. About ten times a year it was like a spaghetti western scene – the scent of spirits, the clucking of hens, the farmer’s naked offspring in the water. The rest of the time everyone washed in the kitchen, in the house’s only sink, using cold water.

  My father held stubbornly to the way of life he had grown up with. Even as an adult, he would wash at the sink. Bending deep over it, puffing and blowing, he would slap water onto his face, spraying it for yards around. He would bore deep into his ears with a washcloth on his index finger, waggling it so violently that it hurt just to watch.

  That is the meagre harvest gleaned from occasional comments – a few stalks left on a mowed field.

  *

  In 1938 came the Anschluss. The family had always been among the village’s public supporters of the Christian Social Party. Dätt and Mam saw their Catholicism as more than just something for Sundays. Additionally, the family didn’t own any business interests that could have benefited from the new political situation. Thanks to the small farm and Dätt’s job, the family was largely sheltered from crises. ‘Guns are loaded by the Devil,’ Mam said. And when his brother-in-law became the Nazi mayor, Dätt – who always did just as he damn well pleased – went back to using the distanced Sie word for ‘you’ when addressing him, instead of du.

  The family didn’t talk politics. Everyone’s mouth was full at mealtimes, and there was no time for sitting around afterwards – chop-chop! They had to eat up and get back to work. Then the order came for Emil, the eldest son, to join the Hitler Youth. He refused, saying he couldn’t, as he was with the Red Cross. When Emil was threatened with expulsion from the business academy if he didn’t change his mind, Dätt didn’t shirk confrontation. Emil was allowed to stay in school, but the family’s child benefit was cut off for all eight children. The family had no further trouble, however, unlike the next-door neighbours, who were shamed by a sign on their house that read ‘Diese familie ist gegen das deutsche Volk,’ or, ‘This family is against the German people.’

  Paul remembers the lower-case f in familie, when in correct German it should be a capital F. He was eleven or twelve and had stood in front of the sign for a good while, surprised at the mistake. A newly married man and woman lived in that house. When the woman died at the age of ninety-four, my father took over her nursing home room. That’s how people’s lives are linked in a small village.

  When the war started, my father and all his school-age siblings were either at the business academy or the grammar school. They were given more than a basic education because, on the one hand, their parents respected education as an alternative to their small-scale farming (which would have, at most, been able to provide a living for one child), and because, on the other, they took joy in their offspring’s talents. They also liked the fact that schoolchildren could help at home more than apprentices could. Nobody in the family objected to schooling except Robert, the third-youngest son, who dropped out because he was afraid that they wanted to make a priest of him.

  *

  Because it was wartime, my father had to take early graduation exams in February 1944 and was conscripted: a mere seventeen-year-old grammar-school boy from a farming family, an unworldly altar boy with little life experience – neither a child nor an adult, neither military nor civilian, as Bulgakov called such schoolboy soldiers.

  He was transferred from the Labour Service to the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1944. It was a similar story for his brother Emil, three years older, and Paul, one year younger. Back home the family was now forced to follow political developments more closely, concerned about their conscripted brothers and sons, the boys. When they hadn’t heard anything for weeks, ‘What’s happened?’

  Emil was lucky. He quickly fell into American hands in Africa and spent the rest of the war as an interpreter in Montana. Letters from him arrived home after a while, so the family knew he was safe.

  Paul was captured in 1945 in Italy by troops from New Zealand. In the POW camp near Bari, he found ways to earn a little extra money on the side. He made needles from fencing wire and would knit caps from unravelled pullover sleeves, selling them to fellow prisoners who either suffered in the sun or simply wanted to look good. He wore his own cap for a long time after the war.

  As Paul was only seventeen, he was sent home in the summer of 1945. He didn’t tell people he was coming. Arriving completely unnoticed, he went to see the three cows in the barn first, and then to the still, where cousin Rudolf was making schnapps. Rudolf climbed up the steps to the kitchen ahead of him, where Mam was working. Not many days earlier she had lost her tenth child, a boy, just hours after the birth. The umbilical cord had got caught around the baby’s neck.

  ‘Got a soldier here looking for somewhere to stay, Theres,’ Rudolf told her.

  She had hesitated, because the house was full, even with three sons gone. Then Paul stepped forward out of the shadows and tears started to run down his cheeks.

  At first things seemed to work out for my father too. During his training he was twice sent home on sick leave because of a stubborn infection in his lower right arm. Soon after, he offered to go home and fetch ‘the club’ some schnapps for the Christmas festivities. He spent two Advent weeks in Wolfurt. But then, in February 1945, he was sent to the Eastern Front to be an eighteen-year-old trucker without a driver’s licence. In Upper Silesia he got into a serious accident when a horse-drawn cart didn’t get out of his way on a highway. His horn broken and brakes useless because of the ice on the road, he steered the truck down the embankment. The truck rolled over several times. When his superior threatened to send my father in front of a war tribunal for sabotage, my father noted the fact that he had no driver’s licence and shouldn’t have been driving at all.

  When the general disintegration of the army was apparent, he took himself off and tried with a few other Austrians to reach the American forces. Perhaps out of homesickness, the group went in the wrong direction – instead of going west, they went south, right through Bohemia, taking the shortest route towards home, but also towards the Russians. They were already on Austrian soil, in the Kamp Valley, when their hopes of a quick return were dashed.

  When my father would later claim that he saw the world during the war, he didn’t mean the war so much as the time after it. His punishment as a POW was to move the spoils of war for his captors. Once, during a meal, he found a bone in the soup that was obviously rotten, but in his hunger he gnawed away at it. The next day he had dysentery and very soon he weighed no more than six stone. He spent the next four weeks in an army hospital at the edge of Bratislava, in conditions that I knew nothing of until a few months ago. He never once mentioned those four weeks. My father’s tales would start with the day when the Soviets let him go, ‘because I wasn’t worth anything to them any more.’

  Together with some other Austrians, he was taken by a Red Army soldier to the Austrian-Slovakian border on the Morava river near Hainburg.

  ‘
Goodbye, Austrians!’ were the Red Army soldier’s parting words. Even now, sometimes my father murmurs these words when he is deep in thought.

  The trip back to Vorarlberg took another three weeks, with obstacles at every turn. My father had neither the money nor the papers he needed to go from the Soviet to the American zone. He didn’t want to have a photo taken for an identity card, because it would have taken two weeks for the film to be developed. Plagued by homesickness, he hoped for the opportunity to cross the border illegally.

  He refused the beds that were offered to him, because he knew he had lice. He slept in the skittle alley of an inn and on farmers’ hay.

  After six days of waiting in Urfahr, some fellow Vorarlbergers smuggled him across the Danube to Linz under the seat of a Red Cross vehicle. He was deloused by the Americans.

  Now he had his photo taken, because there was a photographer in Linz who could develop the film quickly. This was the very photo that he carried around for almost sixty years in his wallet.

  On the train, somewhere past Innsbruck, he met some people from Wolfurt and asked them for bread. In Lauterach, where he got out, he met a cousin, who didn’t recognise him at first because of his short hair and all the weight he had lost. The cousin accompanied him home.

  I can only imagine my father’s feelings when he returned after his long absence. Even when I come from Vienna, there’s a joy that wells up when I read the names of the stations after the Arlberg Tunnel, as if they were part of a poem: Langen, Wald, Dalaas, Braz, Bings, Bludenz.

  My father came home in the second week of September, on the ninth, when the light was once again golden and the third hay harvest was about to be brought in, ahead of the pear and apple harvest. And in October, as if nothing had happened, he was at a desk again at the business academy.

  Or was there more to it than that?

  What no one knew at the time was that this nineteen-year-old would never again open himself up to the world. That was over for good. He must have sworn to himself in the hospital never to leave home again, if he were ever to make it back from his long, slow journey. His earlier ambition of studying electrical engineering was gone. Facts change feelings.

  I still remember how difficult a topic holidays were when I was growing up. My father would say a hundred times over that Wolfurt was lovely enough for him. At the time such phrases seemed like patent disguises for his inertia. And they may very well have been excuses, but if so, then just in part. It was only much later that I came to understand that behind my father’s refusal lay a trauma, and that in our hearts, things never end; for this reason, my father’s behaviour was what it was. He took these precautions to ensure that he would never be in danger again. He didn’t want to be so far from home a second time.

  It’s a strange irony that he did, of course, end up in a situation many years later in which he wanted almost daily to get home – because he had forgotten he was already there.

  ‌

  Look, Dad, this is the garden wall you made with your own hands.

  True. I’ll take it home with me.

  You can’t take it with you.

  Nothing easier.

  It can’t be done, Dad.

  Let me show you.

  Oh, come on, Dad – seriously?! You can’t do it. And here’s another question for you – tell me how you plan to go home, when you’re already home.

  I don’t quite follow.

  You’re home but you want to go home. You can’t go home when you’re already home.

  That’s true, objectively speaking.

  So?

  I’m not nearly as interested in all that as you are.

  ‌

  Our early failures behind us, we had become more understanding with our father, although each new day still kept us on our toes with its own surprises. We didn’t look back much, always forwards, for the illness kept giving us new challenges. We were beginners, trying to maintain a semblance of control over our lives, but without basic knowledge or skills.

  Our father took to wandering. Mainly he walked to my older brother Peter’s house. Peter lives across the street and has three daughters. But increasingly his excursions took him beyond that familiar radius – sometimes in the middle of the night, barely clothed, with a frightened look in his eye. Once we couldn’t find him because he had strayed into one of the children’s bedrooms in his house and lain down in a bed. Sometimes he rummaged through wardrobes and was then surprised when my brother Werner’s trousers didn’t fit him. There came a day when we wrote August on his door and locked the neighbouring rooms.

  Often he had blood on his head or cuts on his knees when he came back from a wander to his childhood home. He would stumble on the steep and overgrown hill. Once he forced his way into his parents’ old home and suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs in front of his sister-in-law, asking after his brother Erich. When I was a child, the latch on the front door could easily be opened by sticking a finger through a hole in the wood. My father must have tried to do so again and again, not knowing that the latch didn’t work any more. The futility of his efforts threw him so much that he decided to break down the door.

  My sister recalls how he would answer the phone, but a minute later would have forgotten the message he was supposed to pass on. And of course, if one of his possessions was missing, it was always the others who had taken or stolen it. When we asked him where something was, he knew nothing and reacted indignantly to the suggestion that he might have had anything to do with its disappearance. His electric shaver, for which we had been desperately searching, turned up in the microwave. He had been losing his front door key so regularly that my mother not only tied the key to his trousers, she sewed it on. That didn’t seem right to him, however, so he would tug and pull at it.

  He developed obsessions. His most stubborn bugbear was with the birch that stood near the house and which Hurricane Lothar had knocked to a sharp angle. Dozens of times a day, our father, either pointing at the tree, which continued to grow to ever-greater heights, or looking at the approaching clouds, would ask whether the birch would withstand the next storm or fall on the house. The electric meter was never far from his thoughts either. He would check it manically. I can still hear the regular click of the magnetic catch as he opened and shut the cupboard with the meter. When the house was rattling with cold on winter mornings, we knew that our father had been messing with one of the switches again. Who was to blame? The others, of course.

  Dätt, we had heard, had also been a keen energy saver. When he joined his family for breakfast and thought it was already bright enough outside, he would turn off the light, saying, ‘You’ll find your mouths easily enough.’

  Little stories like that.

  Dätt had always been careful to ensure that the curtains didn’t hang in front of the windows. He used to push them all the way to the side, to let in the most light possible. He had been very frugal – perhaps the only characteristic that had been wholly passed on to his children.

  Now our father would constantly think about energy consumption, too. His brain at this time was like a barrel organ, always playing the same tune.

  But then one day, the obsessions disappeared. It was a little spooky. Our father started being creative.

  For a long time we had been dealing with his forgetfulness and lost abilities, but now the illness started to uncover new skills. Our father, who had always been an honest man, developed a real talent for excuses. He could find an excuse quicker than a mouse its hole. His manner of speaking changed and suddenly displayed a spontaneous elegance that I’d never noticed before. And what he said had such a striking internal logic that we didn’t know whether to be astonished, to laugh, or to cry.

  ‘What beautiful weather!’ I remarked once, as we stood by his house with a view of the Gebhardsberg summit, across the Bregenzer Ache river, and to the Känzele’s slopes.

  My father looked around, thought about what I had said, and replied, ‘I could predict the weather re
liably from home, but from here I can’t. As I’m no longer at home, it’s become impossible.’

  ‘The climate here is almost the same as down there,’ I said in surprise, as our house is only fifty yards up the hill from his parents’.

  ‘Yes, that’s just it. You see what a difference that can make!’ He thought for a moment, adding, ‘And what’s more, things don’t turn out well when you all meddle in my weather.’

  His new talents were most evident when he would get stressed trying to find his way home. It must have been around 2004 when he suddenly stopped recognising his own house. It happened surprisingly, shockingly, quickly. We could hardly take it in. For a long time we refused to accept that our father had forgotten something as fundamental as this.

  One day my sister couldn’t listen to his insistent pleading any longer. Every five minutes he said that he was expected at home. It was unbearable, or at least that’s how it felt to us at the time. Helga went out into the street with him and announced, ‘This is your house!’

  ‘No, it’s not my house,’ he replied.

  ‘Then tell me where you live.’

  He gave the right house number and street name.

  Helga pointed triumphantly to the sign by the front door on which was written the house number, and asked, ‘And what does this say?’

  He read out the number he had mentioned before.

  ‘So what can we conclude?’ Helga asked.

  ‘That someone stole the sign and screwed it on here,’ replied our father without blinking an eye. It was a fantastical idea, but one that made sense in its way.

  ‘Why would someone steal our house sign and screw it onto their house?’ asked Helga crossly.

  ‘Good question. That’s just what people are like.’

  There was a tone of regret in his statement, but he was completely untroubled by his improbable explanation.