The Old King in his Exile

by Stefan Tobler

  The house gave off a feeling of something makeshift and patched. When it came to his extensions and renovations, our father had normally only asked for help when it was too late. At his day job, he had always possessed the knowledge he needed to work independently. With his home improvements, he’d also had faith in his specialist knowledge – but with less convincing results. Plus, he had developed a near-pathological aversion to throwing anything away. That job was now left to his children.

  Our father’s eighty-third birthday fell on a weekend. As all of the family was going to be there, our mother had a skip delivered to the house on the Friday. We were going to clear it out.

  We got to work and things went smoothly. Everyone felt a load fall from their shoulders as the storage areas emptied and the garden and garage started to look presentable once more. Disappointingly, the skip wasn’t nearly big enough for our gargantuan task. After just a few trips it was already full. We hadn’t even reached the top floor of the house and there was still stuff piled high in the cellar – stuff he had hoarded for possible later use and yet which over time had become utterly useless. A neighbour, from whom we had borrowed a plastic sheet because it was threatening to rain, had warned us that when they had emptied out their parents’ house, they had needed two skips.

  By the end of August a second skip was outside the house. My sister had bought our own plastic sheet because rain was forecast again, which was also why we, including Katharina and my mother, got a head start that Friday. On the attic this time. The house is relatively tall: the windows under the gable stand about thirty feet above street level. From one of the windows in Peter’s old bedroom, we threw down everything that had been mouldering away in the attic for decades and decades – boards, sheets of plasterboard, boxes of clothes, old bunk beds, doors, chests of drawers, carpets, suitcases, shutters, eiderdowns and mattresses, and some furniture that shattered on impact. There were pieces lying, like a bevy of drunkards, around the front garden.

  Among the board games was The Game of Life. Out it went. Done.

  *

  It rained on Saturday and into Sunday, but by Sunday afternoon the sun was shining, so we got back to work. Our mother fetched our father, and everyone was in good spirits. Our father seemed to be at peace with his world. Walking on the terrace with him, I rested my arm on his shoulder. He gave me a cheeky look and said, ‘I see, so now you need my help, you lazy bugger.’

  ‘I have to admit, it is nice to rest a bit.’

  Later, when we were working again, he said, ‘I’ll help you if you really need me. But I’m stressing the “really”! Anyway, I’ve said my piece, now you weigh it and see how you’ll deal with it. I think you’re clever enough.’

  At lunchtime he had already told Helga and me how well he’d built the garden fence and how well he’d planned the construction of the house. He was in a bright mood, very eloquent, and enjoying the fact that we were praising him to the skies.

  ‘Yes, we can certainly learn from you!’

  And, of course, we did learn something from him: that it’s better not to keep everything you could possibly imagine needing one day. What a shocking contrast this attic was to his room in the old people’s home! There, he lived in a confined space without the opportunity to store much. And what things does a person need until death? I often thought about that during the clear-out. For even in the house, there were only a handful of possessions in which my father’s life was so deeply inscribed that we absolutely needed to keep them. Most of the things we dragged out were, quite honestly, junk.

  On Sunday evening, when it was already getting dark, all four of us children set to work on the cellar – Peter, Helga and Werner in the workshop, and me in the cellar’s storeroom. There I found an old coffee mill, a wooden schnitzel mallet, lampshades, the drum from my parents’ first washing machine, craft materials, and empty wine boxes. All the dust and mould made me sneeze. I opened the thin horizontal window under the ceiling, just above street level. Peter and I had climbed through this window when he was thirteen and I was ten. We had come home from a snorkelling holiday with a conservation organisation and had been dropped off at one in the morning. I had crept to my bed, where I found Helga, probably because her own bed had been rented out to holidaymakers. As I slipped into bed, she woke up and told me that Uncle Alwin, Maria’s husband, had died and was already buried. I had been shocked that things like a burial and an uncle disappearing could happen during my absence.

  Such events kept coming to mind now, sleepy echoes that we startled out of their dusty corners.

  Helga came out of the workshop with two traps for catching field mice and asked if we still needed them. We didn’t, as field mice are practically endangered in Wolfurt. I remembered how Uncle Paul had replied when I once asked what my father’s greatest gift was – ‘Catching mice!’

  In the spring of 1939, the parish had given a few pennies’ reward for every field mouse caught. August and Paul had each earned themselves a bike from their mouse hunting. Paul had only helped out; August was the brains. They had hunted on a neighbour’s meadow as well as their own.

  Catching mice was seen as a positive thing back then. The parish also gave a small reward for every pound of cockchafers. Josef and Robert took long sticks and a sheet along the Bregenzer Ache river, where there were a lot of broadleaf trees, and in one day they gathered forty kilos of them. For children, this was the only way to get their own money.

  *

  Swinging my broom back and forth, I swept the dust out the door. By half past nine that evening we were done. We didn’t cover the skip this time, because the sky was cloudless and full of stars. I went down into the terrace flat – the very place where I had moved when I was thirteen, thanks to the indecipherable power dynamics in the family at the time. Now the house was quiet. My mother had withdrawn to the top floor, and Katharina had already taken the night train to Vienna the night before. I sat down with my laptop and wrote some notes. I remembered that Werner had said something that made me prick up my ears. On a little shelf on the wall by the storeroom, he had found various papers, of which some looked very private. He didn’t want to investigate any more closely.

  I went into the workshop. In a pile of assorted documents, I found a folder with thirteen sheets of paper. On these sheets, at the age of twenty-four, our father had recorded his memories of the end of the war. The folder had lain there for decades and I hadn’t known of its existence.

  Down the dimly lit passage I stumbled, back to the kitchen, where I sat down with the sheets and read. The war hadn’t meant much to him as an eighteen-year-old – it was just a lost year, a topic he dealt with in a few quick sentences. The writing tempo slowed after he left the front. He described in much greater depth his time in the army hospital and his difficult journey home, during which he had been looking for people who spoke his Vorarlberg dialect, so that he could ask for a little bread without it looking too much like begging.

  The details shocked me, on the one hand because of how extreme they were, and on the other hand because I suddenly felt that, in spite of all my efforts, I knew very little about my father, about where he came from, about his fears and desires.

  I had known that while forced to pack up the spoils of war for the Russians, he had gnawed on a rotten bone and fallen ill with dysentery. And sometimes he used to mention that his weight had dropped to around six stone, pointing to the photo he kept safe in his wallet’s plastic window. What was new to me was that before the photo was taken, he had spent four weeks bedridden, lying between dying and dead men. Just outside Bratislava, in the hovel that they called an army hospital, they had built twenty-inch-wide racks for the sick. Two people were squeezed onto each rack, forcing them to lie close together on their sides. Given all the infectious diseases and the inadequately treated wounds, it was a death trap.

  Unlike the days, the nights were on the cold side, and as the Russian nurses, whom I remember with anything but fondness, only allowed one blanke
t for every two men, I was sometimes freezing. So I saw myself forced to ask one of my fellow sufferers, one who was no longer bedridden, to try and procure a sweater for me. And in fact the very next morning he handed me one, saying he had pulled it off a dead man in the night, before the Russians saw the man was dead.

  For a long time my bunk was right opposite the so-called death camp. It was where doctors sent patients who were so far gone that they’d been written off. These poor people couldn’t eat, they bled onto their sick beds, and called out with weak, desperate voices for an orderly when they needed to go to the toilet… It was a terrible sight. Almost every day I saw men die, abandoned, with no one to stand by them. Most were fully conscious, but their bodies were just skin and bones.

  *

  These dead men must have continued to whisper to him in the dark for years. When the dead whisper, they do so stubbornly and insistently. If there were to be a vote on whether it’s nicer to be dead or alive, the dead – who are in the majority – would swear it was death.

  For two days I had a fever, then it broke. It was no surprise that I was set to work again, and in fact I had to bury the dead. The ten people who had died in the last few days were thrown onto a hay cart under a few old blankets, after being completely undressed. Eight prisoners were used like carthorses – through Pressburg’s side streets they went, to a scrapyard, where a deep hole had been dug. The dead were thrown in. I had the unpleasant job of filling in the hole afterwards. No one knew how many dead people had been buried in the area. There were certainly a number of graves there already, if you can even call them ‘graves’.

  *

  My father had never encountered such terrible desolation in the world he came from – people died at home with their families around them and priests at their bedsides. And graves carried the names of the dead. Perhaps that was why for many years on All Souls, my father collected for the Austrian Black Cross, a charity that looks after war graves. Apart from that, he never met up with fellow veterans and didn’t talk to his children about the collecting. It was something between him and the dead. They inhabited his dreams and his imagination, quietly but powerfully influencing his decisions. That’s what the dead do. ‘Yes, get home. I’ve only got one piece of advice for you: stay home and don’t leave!’

  *

  On Sunday night the moon stood directly above the nearest fir tree and shone onto my bed. Towards morning, I half-sensed violent winds. They blew newspapers down the stairs to the flat and the rustling paper disturbed my sleep. And yet in the morning the second skip was gone. No one had noticed. We were still asleep when it was fetched. After a brief closing and opening of our eyes the road in front of the house once again stood empty under the sun’s morning rays, as if nothing had happened.

  Over the next few days, every time we went out in the car my mother and I took more paper, metal and clothes to be recycled. The garage slowly emptied. Only some wood was left, and what we had put aside for the boy scouts’ jumble sale. Not much at all compared to what had been there. My mother left again, and I stayed alone in the house for a few days, knowing that my father would never again return to some of its rooms. On Sundays and at family celebrations he would sit in the kitchen and the living room. But his bedroom, now as empty as a dance floor, was no longer part of his world.

  I often wandered around the house, moved to think that someone had taken great trouble to create a safe and cosy space here. Now everything had been wrecked – the man, the house, the world. I thought I’d write a book one day with the title Landscape after Battle.

  It was the time of the third mowing, the beginning of September. Erich, my father’s second-youngest brother, was cutting the grass in the orchard with a scythe, all by hand, section by section. I found consolation in his work. Late summer is my favourite time of year. The ruddy apples and yellow pears hang from the tall trees over the mown meadow. There is always a wind that makes the trees sometimes creak like frigates, and children are out playing in the neighbouring gardens. And the shadows of the trees, which have lost so many leaves already, are cast more sharply than ever by the low sun.

  From my desk I looked out over the orchard and the nearby houses. Uncle Erich and Aunt Waltraud worked outside almost every day. Once I saw a little Turkish boy who lived in the neighbouring house – he must have been about six years old – run along behind Uncle Erich, who was loading hay onto the cart. I had often seen him ‘working’ with my uncle. The boy was eating an apple that he had picked up from our orchard and called my uncle ‘Grandad’, suggesting they were both developing a new cultural identity. The society my father and his siblings grew up in has all but disappeared now. There are still some farming activities, but there’s no small-farm way of life. Structural change, as it is called, has turned Wolfurt into a residential and industrial parish. Nowadays, if you plant fruit trees and let them grow to their full height, you receive a subsidy from local government, so that here and there in the village spots remind people of a culture now nearing its end.

  Munching on the apple, the boy bounded across the field behind my uncle and called out a reply to a distant child – ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’

  He went over to the edge of the field, where two new buildings had been erected on the site of the neighbour’s former orchard. The boy watched a young man swinging his daughter around by a hand and foot in their garden before going with her into the new house through its veranda door. The man was the grandson of the woman whose place my father had taken in the care home. The boy ran back to Erich, who was drawing the cart laden with hay back towards his house. Soon the orchard was empty, and the light green stubble shimmered gently.

  An airship approached from Friedrichshafen and turned around above the corner of the upper field – as it did several times a day in summer, weather permitting. A buzzard flew over the lower field. Two carrion crows attacked him in flight, stabbing at his back and wings, although the buzzard didn’t seem bothered. He certainly didn’t attempt to avoid their pecking. He glided leisurely on towards the river.

  I thought about how it used to be when there was a storm brewing and fifteen or twenty of us in the family worked feverishly to bring in the hay before the rain. The men shouting loudly in the direction of the tractor that pulled the trailer. The grunt when a forkful of hay was thrown up onto the wagon, where we children grabbed the hay and stamped it into the corners. The quick steps of the women in sandals who gathered up the stalks that had been left. And the steady chugging of the tractor and the rumblings of approaching thunder. And then the mad dash to the barn. On the load of hay, we would lie down flat on our bellies so that the branches of the pear trees didn’t clip us around the ears when the tractor drove under them. Little clumps of hay hung from the branches and would remain there for days. And great big raindrops splashed on our bare legs – legs scratched raw by the hay. And the happy screeching of our younger cousins, who ran along behind the wagon. Someone had gone on ahead, by bike, and opened the big barn door. Accompanied by more shouting, the hay cart was manoeuvred under the overhang. Then the patter of rain on the roof and road. And the air in the barn so hot it was suffocating.

  Later we sat in our grandparents’ living room, drinking juice and eating ice cream. Then, at home, a shower, our noses full of hay dust, and a quick dinner in front of the television, already too tired to follow the images, which seemed part of our coming dreams. Then off to bed, where the raw linen sheets soothed our scratched calves, and immediately asleep.

  I also remember that my father and his brothers would meet at dawn to mow the hillside. This would happen three times a year in the late seventies and early eighties. Normally it was five of them: Emil, August, Paul, Robert and Erich. They each brought their own scythe and whetstone. Paul and my father came in their old football boots, because the spikes gave them a good grip, even when they stepped on slugs. The five brothers mowed the steep slope in even strips. The windows of the bedroom I shared with Werner faced the hillside and in the summer
they were tilted open, so we would wake at five in the morning at the first sounds of the whetstones. Sometimes two of the men sharpened their blades to the same rhythm, sh-t, sh-t, while in the background we heard the equally rhythmical swooshing of scythes through the dew-wet grass. That went on for about an hour and a half, and we would nod off as they worked. Then our father and his brothers would shoulder their scythes and head home, before driving off to work in a mortgage bank, in the national bank, in the local government offices, in the forest, and as a meter reader.

  As for man, his days are as grass.

  A few cuckooflowers here and there.

  *

  Visiting my father this week, I talked him into arm-wrestling. In the first round, he pulled the wrong way. I explained what we had to do, he understood, and I let him win twice. He had fun, more on account of the ‘nonsense’ we were getting up to than because he won. He didn’t comment on his wins, but said with a smirk, ‘People doing what we’re doing are hardly needed around here.’

  ‌

  What about old age?

  Yes, I get the impression I’m no longer the youngest, that I’m one of ‘the elderly’ or ‘the old people’. I don’t give a hoot how people put it.

  Are you afraid of dying?

  Although it’s pretty disgraceful not to know, I honestly couldn’t tell you.

  ‌

  It was around quarter to four in the afternoon. Having pumped up my tyres at the bike shop, I rode over to the old people’s home. I didn’t see my father in the common area, but found him in his room, lying on his bed, his eyes wide open.