Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  Mother begins milking. She wipes the first cow’s udder with a cloth, then squats on the stool and braces her head against the animal’s flank. Her grip on the teats draws a powerful stream of milk that crashes against the bottom of the pail. On this signal, everything calms down. The pigs slurp more quietly, the hens draw in their heads, the cats gather silently around their drinking bowl, the milk foams in the pail. When she has finished milking the first cow, Mother gives the cats milk to drink. She pours the milk into a bowl Father carved from a piece of wood. Pink cat tongues flap against the white liquid, the cats’ jaws are wet with milk. Their tongues lick the milk from their fur.

  I stand, snug in a veil of haze and cast a glance over the dirty walls. My hands smell of the pigs that press their massive bodies against the gate when they’re done eating in the hope that I’ll scratch their backs. The dog Piko has wiped his morning’s sweat on my dress. Cat hairs, damp with milk, are already stuck to my cheeks. I ask Mother when the next calf will come because I love feeding animals with a bottle. The way they butt with their heads as they nurse always makes me laugh. After I feed the calves, I always let them lick my hands until I become afraid my whole arm might disappear into the warm gullets behind their nubbly tongues. You’ll have to wait a bit longer, Mother says. Father stands outside the barn door and looks at the sky. Fine weather is coming, he says, we’ll have to get a move on tomorrow, fine weather is coming!

  On warm spring weekends, Father sits on the bench next to the beehive and watches the bees’ flight. He has one arm draped over the back of the bench and acts as if he wouldn’t mind my sitting next to him. He looks at the alighting boards in front of the hives’ entrance holes where the foragers land and perform their waggle dances. There will be a good harvest this year, he’ll say, or, I’m worried about the second hive. In late winter, when the thaw sets in, he shovels the snow in front of the apiary so the sun will warm the area in front of the hives more quickly. He has made wooden hive frames, stretched wires across them and pressed sheets of wax onto the wires. He brought the honeycomb into the apiary and swept the piles of dead bees from the apiary floor. On the last day in January, he sent me into the bee-house to listen to the hives, to hear if the colonies were giving any signs of life. When I told him there was a mysterious humming, he looked like a weight had fallen from his shoulders. Now he asks if I’d be willing to help him do the spring check and smoke the hives. I nod and immediately sense that I’ve made a mistake, but it’s too late to retreat.

  The apiary is filled with semi-darkness. A milky light shines through a small, smudged window onto the wooden building’s far wall. Next to the window stand two wardrobes in which Grandmother keeps her clothes. Beehives tower along the front like a broad buzzing wall. In spring, woolen blankets are still draped over the hives. In a separate back room is the honey extractor and fresh sheets of beeswax are piled on a small table near the door.

  Father is glad when I go into the apiary with him. He says he doesn’t like to work alone and presses the smoker into my hands. With a gentle grip, he opens the first hive and I reach the smoker inside the case. I run back outside right away. One by one, Father pulls the honeycombs out of the hive. With an eagle feather, he brushes away the bees hanging onto the frame and takes each honeycomb outside to check it. I wait at a suitable distance until Father comes out carrying a honeycomb crowded with bees and summons me with a nod of his head so that I can get a look at the seething mass. The first to find the queen bee gets to cheer. Stretching my neck, I bend over the colony and call out matica, matica, as soon as I’ve spotted the queen. Father sighs and looks for the queen cells with the tip of his feather. Sometimes he sweeps a colony, made weak by winter, as he says, away from the entrance of another hive and hopes that the weakened bees will be taken in by a neighboring colony. He tells me to stay calm and not make any sudden movements. He says he chose the right day, the bees have flown out and I don’t need to worry, no one will get stung on a day like this. I don’t entirely trust his confidence because I’ve often seen him swollen with beestings. Father likes to blow his cigarette smoke on the bees’ backs. They especially like that, he says, his tobacco can tame the fiercest creatures. He smiles when he sees me draw my head in, afraid an angry worker bee will attack me.

  Grandmother usually comes into the apiary to ask about the state of the bee colonies. She takes a small brown notebook with yellowed pages from a drawer in the wardrobe and notes down the size of the colonies and the number of queens. The cover of the notebook is emblazoned with the German Imperial Eagle. Under the insignia is written Employment Record Book, Name and Location, Nationality: Deutsches Reich. This notebook belonged to your grandfather, she says, though he never used it. He took over the farm on February 1st, 1927 and married on February 27th, 1927, that’s recorded in the notebook, Grandmother tells me. She kept a record of all the rest on the inside of the wardrobe door, where the dates of marriages and deaths are listed in pencil.

  Grandmother can’t bear to throw anything away, Father says, she even uses the old Hitler stuff until it completely falls apart. Nonsense, Grandmother retorts, the winter coat, the one she keeps in this closet, for example, she only wore it once and won’t ever put it on again. She opens the wardrobe and points at a dark gray-green wool coat folded up on the floor. She “organized” it in Ravensbrück and from then on didn’t let it out of her sight, she says. She wore the coat on the day the camp was evacuated. It remained her best coat. Yeah, yeah, Father says and turns back to the bees. I cast a curious look at the coat before Grandmother closes the wardrobe door again and goes to get a jar of honey from the back room with the extractor. I’m surprised she used the word “organized,” which I’d never heard from her lips before. It must have something to do with the secret activity that kept her alive in the camp, I think.

  As soon as summer is palpable and you can’t go into the fields because grass has grown high, the bees call attention to themselves again after a brief rain shower. On such days you can hear the hum of a swarm flying to a branch that protrudes near the house or hanging from a tree at some distance from the farm like a seething cluster of grapes. Father is called from all corners of the farm, he must bring the escapees back to the old queen.

  He rushes to the suspiciously buzzing trees armed with a wooden box and a ladder. This time he has pulled a white hat with a veil over his head and his pleas for help bringing the swarm back home are roundly ignored.

  One time, Mother, trying to help fasten the wooden frame under the swarm of bees, faints after being stung several times. My younger brother and I stand there petrified next to Mother lying on the ground. Father has put a damp cloth on her forehead and raises her gently until she regains consciousness and vomits. From that day on Mother is terrified of bees and I, too, can barely master my distrust of them.

  You have to bear what you’ve provoked, Mother says after I cavalierly cross the bee’s flight paths.

  This time I’m helping Father pull the honey. He brought all the honeycombs with caps into the extraction room and started to remove the top layer of wax from the combs with a broad capping fork. He scrapes the gathered wax off onto the edge of an earthenware bowl painted with flowers that is only used for harvesting honey. I put a few pieces of honeycomb in my mouth and chew them until I’ve sucked out all the honey. If a small piece of honeycomb breaks off the frame during the uncapping, Father hands it to me, and I put the dripping comb in my mouth. The honey streams over my gums like a sticky pap and fills me with delight.

  Father puts the unsealed cells, in which the honey, now visible, sticks like liquid resin, into the extractor and starts to turn the crank. As soon as the honey begins to flow and Father starts praising its color, Grandmother comes back into the apiary. She pulls out her little notebook and starts estimating and writing down the number of liters per hive.

  After the extraction, I return to the front section of the bee-house where a few worker bees are flying about wildly. My fingers are sticky a
nd damp. The bees suddenly attack me and as I’m trying to brush them out of my hair, I feel the stings on my scalp, which tightens from the pain as from a hard blow. I start screaming and hope I won’t faint. Father and Grandmother rush over to me and talk to me, but the pain that is now flooding over my entire body is stronger than any imploring words.

  My eyelids are swollen from tears and beestings when I finally stop crying. My scalp is covered with painful bulges that are visible under my hair. Grandmother puts a bottle of chocolate milk on the table to comfort me and lays cold poultices on my forehead and temples. As I lift the bottle to my mouth, my father’s cousin Michi walks in the kitchen. Such a big girl drinking out of a bottle, it can’t be true, he says reproachfully. Since there is as much astonishment as reproach in his comment, I understand, despite my predicament, that at my age, I really should start using a cup. Leave her alone, Grandmother says, she got stung by the bees. She shows Michi the stings, separating my hair in one section after another as if she were filing index cards. Michi sits with us on the kitchen bench and consolingly strokes my burning cheeks.

  MOTHER helps me practice the Slovenian poetry I’m supposed to learn by heart for school. She says, we’ll do it together, I’ll memorize them with you! While she irons the clothes, I read from my poetry books and schoolbooks. Together we let the flowers grow. We crow with the roosters and peal with the church bells. We croak with the frogs and sing tra-la-la and hop-sa-sa for their weddings. We laugh with the ravens at the scarecrows, let soap bubbles rise like the sun, earth, and moon that turn without wheels and fly without wings. We load springtime with its garlands of flowers onto a boat and sail into the distance. We sit for hours in meadows of language and speak in the rhythm of rhymes. We realize that nature must be adorned with verse and the flowers woven into wreaths. With rhymes we can leap from stanza to stanza like butterflies from one blossom to another without fear of falling. They bring everything to a good conclusion, they turn tears into laughter and silence into celebration. What was dried out will bloom again, what had stiffened will be able to dance again. We believe that every rejected child like Videk in the fairy tale will be given a warm shirt by the forest animals and will find food in the wild garden. Mother loves poems where winter threatens to take away all lazy children and birds promise parents they will raise their children.

  In spring, Mother puts dandelion flowers in my hair and tells me I must be content with simple things. All she needs to be happy is nature, songs, and the Catholic Church. She says there is only one way to live in grace, through industriousness and observing God’s commands. She says, you must observe all the Catholic holidays, attend mass, and say your morning and evening prayers. You have to stop at the wooden crosses on roadsides and at the edges of meadows and cross yourself before the altar. Mother’s ideal room is a church sanctuary. She has to have pictures of saints on the wall above her bed. She insists on having little clouds and divine embellishments decorate the area around the crucifix in our prayer corner. She reads pamphlets and books about martyrs mutilated or killed for their faith or about those who renounced all pleasure in their lives in order to ascend to heaven while still alive. She says that the Virgin Mary may appear to those who work hard and are pure of heart. She sends me and my younger brother to church regularly and thinks nothing of the fact that we have to walk seven kilometers to Eisenkappel. The way to God is always difficult, Mother says.

  I, however, believe that she summons songs and miracles to fight Grandmother’s influence on me. Come, Grandmother says, if you do as I say and finish your homework, you can go watch television at Michi’s house.

  I make myself useful and sometimes in the evening I take my brother across the field and through a small wood to our friendly neighbors who let us sit on their couch and watch television. We often hope in vain to make out human forms in the black and white ripples on the screen.

  On some days Michi tries, with Father’s help, to get better reception. The men walk around the perimeter of the house holding the antenna, which looks like a bare Christmas tree, and we call out the window, now! now!, when the forms on the screen start to emerge more clearly. The mountain shepherd Kekec will soon be able to trill his song to the sun again and play his wondrous flute, putting men and animals under his spell and chasing dark forces away from his mountain village.

  Reception of Slovenian television is unreliable and is certainly not officially sanctioned. Politics won’t ever want it set up for Carinthian Slovenes, Michi says to Father. That would be the Eighth Wonder of the world. We have no choice but to make do with the shadow television and to feel like pirates in fog.

  GRANDMOTHER has her own understanding with nature. She believes the fields and forests must be propitiated, not adorned with verses. A poem means nothing to nature, she says, we must always be humble before it.

  In the attic, she has gathered willow branches that she pulls from the palm bundles blessed in church every year on Palm Sunday. She makes small crosses from the willow branches, crosses we bring out to the fields in spring and stick in the plowed earth to keep the potato fields fertile and the wheat plentiful. When a thunderstorm is brewing, she places pieces of willow on glowing embers and carries them through the house in a cast iron skillet. The bitter smoke is meant to clear the air and appease the atmospheric forces. You must carry your belief in God in your heart, Grandmother says, it’s not enough to put it on show in church. You can’t rely on the Church, according to her, the Church cannot be trusted.

  Grandmother only trusts abnormal signs in the heavens, and she can read them. She believes in the Ember days and the 8th of May, on which she goes to mass every year to give thanks for the end of the Nazi era. She believes in speech that is directed inward to one’s own will, not to the human ear. She says that words are very powerful, that they can cast spells on things and heal people, that bread over which a spell has been uttered along with a plea for intercession can help in sickness and need. Her oldest son was bitten by a snake, she recounts. The wound refused to heal, and the doctors had no idea how to help him. She went to old Rastočnik so that he could put a spell against the snake venom in the bread. But old Rastočnik refused because he was afraid of intensifying the dangerous poison. So then she walked over to see Želodec, who blessed the bread for her. Poisonous animal, take your venom back from this man, Želodec pleaded of the snake’s spirit. I don’t exorcise his flesh, I don’t exorcise his blood, I exorcise the terrible cramp, were the words with which she had consecrated Grandmother’s bread. After Grandmother’s son had eaten a bite of the bread every day and recited the Lord’s Prayer without saying amen at the end, he was healed. The venom had seeped out of him. And the word became bread and dwelt within him as often as he had insalivated the healing word. The bread spoken, the word consumed.

  Grandmother can pray away the occasional sty in my eye. I must answer her intercession with ne verujem – I don’t believe – and must have faith in the healing, she says. She recites her incantation and, with her hand, mimics a reaping motion. Ječmen žanjem, she says, Ječmen žanjem, while I repeat that I don’t believe she’s slicing the sty. Because I admit my doubt, I’m telling the truth and the spell works, at least I believe it does, but I don’t know for sure.

  Grandmother confides to me that her mother gave her a house blessing as a dowry, as a roof of words over her head. She only has to recite it in times of need or nail it onto the door for the house to be protected from lightning and hail and all harm. She keeps the blessing in an envelope that no one is allowed to open without being asked. The prayer could be rubbed or read right off the page. In any case, it’s better if it’s learned by heart because the power lies in the spoken word, not in writing.

  I picture the words rising from the envelope, through my eyes, into my head and from there to unknown heights. I also imagine how the words, untouched, could work their effect from the envelope; how, with the speaker’s voice, they could spread a wing of words over the conjuror.

 
Old lady Keberin also gave my grandfather a blessing, wrapped in a velvet cloth, before he went off to join the partisans to protect him from sudden death, from betrayal, and from evil deeds, Grandmother tells me. He had to say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys each day. He prayed every day and he survived as a partisan. He came back from the forest. Just like the man who survived the war, the man Romana from Remschenig could remember, Grandmother says. Back then, when Romana was arrested, she was barely ten years old. She was interrogated in the Klagenfurt prison, and they yanked her hair when a partisan was brought into the room whom she didn’t know and on whom they had found the holy shield, the ščit božji as he called it. The Gestapo asked the partisan what good it was and he answered, I am under God’s protection. At that, they beat him until he collapsed, covered with blood, under their blows. The girl was forced to watch it all, but the partisan survived and was carried unconscious from the room. He was protected by the word, Grandmother says.

  This terrifies me. I beg the holy shield to keep me from thinking about what it might be able to prevent from happening to me. Don’t brood on it, Grandmother says, you’ve heard too much and believed too much. She smiles her thin, restrained smile and pushes me out of the room and into the courtyard.

  Barking, Piko runs back and forth on his chain. Clucking loudly, the chickens scurry down the sloping meadow behind our house. They spread their wings and try to fly.

  There must be hawk, Grandmother says, now it’s hunting right outside our door! She will tell the hunters about the incident so they’ll shoot the bird of prey. Mother comes out from behind the house, a rooster bleeding in her arms. It fought the hawk, she had to tear the rooster out of its claws, the hawk had sunk them so deeply into the rooster’s wings, she explains and lays the wounded fowl on the ground. The rooster shakes itself and spreads its bloodied wings. Limping and crowing, it hops towards the henhouse.