Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  I can’t figure out what I’m really living. My feelings aren’t on speaking terms with the words I say. Before, if I aimed my words at objects, emotions, and grasses, I’d hit them, now my words bounce off the objects and emotions. Before, it seemed to me that the feelings took on the words, but now I’m left behind with everything for which there is no language, or if there is, it’s one I can’t use.

  Walking defines me. I walk to school. I walk home. I walk across the field and back again. I look up at the treetops and reach for the fruit. I walk to the mountain stream; its splashing fills the valley from the bottom up with invisible bubbles like a tub filled with a foam of noise. My thoughts are spiraling chimaeras, conjectures about Death who’s peeling off his old skin and still isn’t sure when he’ll show himself, when he’ll show everything in its true light. Presumption.

  It’s always different with the children in my schoolbooks. There’s never anyone like me. I consider withdrawing from childhood because its roof has grown leaky, because I run the risk of foundering with it. I also think that much more has happened to me than could possibly be good for any child and that I already should have changed into something else, although I have no notion what that might be.

  And there are still those words standing around in pretty crinolines, balancing like ballerinas on the tips of their toes, and rumors of being sent to another school. These thoughts seep into me like a clear carillon, and I imagine how changing schools could cut me off from these surroundings.

  Secret thoughts become vain. Timid, burnished thoughts begin circling in my head. They smell of lilies of the valley and look like they’ve just emerged from a beauty bath. They wear princess dresses and fur-lined high-heeled shoes.

  After school, I like to go see Aunt Malka who lives with Sveršina in the Auprich cottage. She was one of the girls on our farm, Grandfather’s youngest and prettiest sister, who’d married the widowed Farmer Auprich and, because he died in the war, now lives in the small cottage with Sveršina.

  Aunt Malka is the only one who finds everything I say enchanting. She doesn’t just smile at me when I visit her. She beams, she claps her hands, and strokes my cheeks. She gives me a hug. Good Lord, she says, good Lord, my girl, my darling girl, what do you want, what would you like me to give you? She makes me palatschinken, pancakes spread with a thick layer of jam. She slips me pieces of candy that glow in my book bag like small spheres of bliss that I keep for myself and don’t share with anyone. She sits with me while I eat and wants to know what’s new at home. Oh, nothing, I say, Grandmother’s doing well. And your father, she asks. He’s doing well, too, I answer. The two of them suffered through so much, she observes, enough for several lives. Does your grandmother tell you how things were then, she wants to know. Yes, sometimes, I say, I know a few stories. You should ask her, Malka urges me. She, too, had told her children many stories once they started to be curious, how she and the others were arrested as partisans and taken to Ravensbrück, how the war turned their lives upside down. Of course children shouldn’t be frightened too much, it could make them as strange as their parents and grandparents, as crazy as she is. Her fear of planes, for example. Every time she sees a plane in the sky she has to run into the house and hide. She has become so childish with time, she says, terribly childish, as if she’s turned into a girl instead of an old woman. There’s no explanation for it and none for the horrifying dreams she has. Sometimes Malka dreams she’s back in Ravensbrück, and she constantly has to calm Sveršina down. When he can’t sleep, he also talks about Mauthausen, but he doesn’t say much, he’s never very talkative. But your grandmother has kept her pride, she hasn’t become as fearful as I have, she’s not as skittish, Malka tells me.

  Sveršina, on the other hand, doesn’t want to hear anything about me when he joins us at the white enamel table. He never asks after my parents or Grandmother. He sits there without saying a word. He seems to know more about them than I do.

  FATHER avoids us for days after the most recent incident with the gun. He works in the forest and rarely comes home. The mood on our farm is like after a deafening explosion. An inner numbness has us in a stranglehold and makes talking difficult. I wonder if Father’s condition might have something to do with me or with Mother’s attitude. I can’t come up with anything about me that would drive Father to such episodes, so I watch Mother very closely. I’m suddenly suspicious of her loud laughter. I silently reproach her for never joking as boisterously with Father as she does with the acquaintances who come to visit or whom she meets after mass.

  But Father is also friendlier outside the house than at home. As long as he’s not drunk, he smiles engagingly. He drapes his arms casually over various seat and chair backs. His tongue loosens and he becomes talkative and says “I” and “I have” and “I”.

  I begin to suspect that he’s automatically drawn to those who were hunted by the Nazis and that he thinks there’s something fishy about people who, as he says, pretend to be better than they are. This doesn’t surprise me. I can’t remember ever finding it surprising. Grandmother also never stops complaining that Mother wants to be something better, that Mother knows nothing about people or the world because she never suffered a day in her life, because she has no idea what suffering is. I debate whether I should take sides in the argument smoldering between Mother and Grandmother and in the end decide to side with Grandmother because she has been through so much in her life and Mother is always finding fault with me.

  Father begins to withdraw from social life. When Michi asks him to sing in the Slovenian Cultural Association’s mixed choir, Father declines. They should just leave him in peace with their cultural activities, he says. He never wants to step onstage again, his days of acting and music-making are over. Michi is sorry to hear it and asks if Father would at least consider joining the association’s yearly excursion, it’s always great fun. Yes, Father agrees, for that he’ll go along. He also refuses to go to parent-teacher conferences at school. That’s only for people who think they’re important, he says. He’s never been full of himself, he’s never been one of those people.

  Now and then I go collect him from the neighbors’ place, where he’s gotten stuck, as he says, after work in the forest. He likes to sit in the kitchen of the Peršman farm with Anči, who survived back when the SS shot the entire family. She was seven years old, Father says, and she was hit six times. You can still see the bullet wounds on her chin and hand. She was able to play dead, but the younger children cried and were shot and killed.

  When I arrive, Father is usually sitting at the end of the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in his hand. Anči presides near the stove on which she keeps her children’s dinner warm. As soon as I enter the kitchen, I start to examine her face and hands for scars. She was able to hide behind the stove, Anči says, but her little brother, who was in her arms, was shot.

  On the front of the house is a marble plaque with the names of the children, the parents, and grandparents, engraved and gold-plated. Father says he could never live in a house where he’d be reminded of the dead every day, several times a day, every time he went in or out.

  WHEN I come home from school one day, Grandmother tells me that old Pečnica is dead and that she wants me to go with her to the wake.

  As darkness falls, we cross the field behind our house and walk through the woods up to the Pečniks’. People stand by the front door, talking in hushed voices. Grandmother and I enter the room where old Pečnica is laid out. Neighbors sit and pray on the wooden benches that line the walls. The coffin is set before an open window and is surrounded with wreathes and flower arrangements of glowing red and white blossoms.

  Grandmother cuts a small chunk of bread from the loaf handed to her. She gives me a bite and says that with this bread, she’s cut off a bit of eternity, that by this bread we’ll recognize each other in the hereafter, by the bread we eat at wakes. I’m not sure I want to eat this bread because the thought of meeting the dead in the hereafter scare
s me. I quickly slip the bread out of my mouth and hide it in my coat pocket. On a small table at the foot of the bier are two white candles, a statue of the Virgin Mary, a framed photograph, and two teacups with holy water to sprinkle on the dead woman. Only now do I notice that the coffin is encircled with intertwined red carnations that look like they’re growing out of the corpse. Grandmother tells me to take the small twig of boxwood from the teacup and sprinkle the dead woman with holy water. The only part of her I recognize are her strong hands, folded on her stomach. At the head of the bier, Grandmother lifts me slightly so that I can see the woman’s face. I see an unfamiliar, round, waxy face, bordered by a dark kerchief and I quickly make a few motions in the shape of a cross with the boxwood twig. Done, I say to Grandmother, who is groaning under my weight. She lowers me to the flowers, lays her hand on the dead woman’s forearm, and makes the sign of the cross with her fingertips. After we’ve sat down on a bench set close to the bier, I notice that Michi is also sitting on the bench, crying. I ask Grandmother if Michi is related to the dead woman and she says no, but Pečnica was very good to the neighbor’s children.

  On the way home, Grandmother tells me that on Christmas in ’44, Pečnica took in Michi and his sisters, Zofka and Bredica, after the police had surrounded the Kuchars’ house and had shot at Michi’s mother and the partisans who were staying there. Luckily, Michi held his mother back so she couldn’t run out of the house. She would have been immediately mowed down by the patrol like Primož who ran out ahead of her. The seven-year-old Michi, his entire body trembling, stepped out in front of the house with the two Knolič sisters, Anni and Malka, who were also partisans. The Knolič sisters were arrested at once and taken to Ravensbrück. Michi had to step over Primož’s body and saw the police beat two more partisans who had surrendered with their butts of their guns. One of the wounded partisans was her own brother Cyril, whom I must know, Grandmother tells me. The children went to the Pečniks with just a few possessions. Pečnica warmed them up and took care of them until they’d calmed down enough to go stay with relatives over in Lobnik two weeks later.

  After Pečnica’s burial, for which Father and Mother drove to Eisenkappel, I overhear a heated conversation between Father and Grandmother in the sitting room.

  He knows exactly, Father claims, Beti told him, or maybe it was old Pečnik, back then in January ’44, the two of them had gone to Hojnik’s to see what happened after the police had killed old Hojnik, who was in bed with pneumonia, and had shot the farmer’s family. They’d heard the shots from the Pečniks’ place and could see something was burning. The dead bodies had been thrown, half-burnt, onto the manure pile. After old Pečnik went to Eisenkappel to report the incident, the police came back at night, poured gasoline on the rest of the Hojniks, and set them on fire. Nonsense, Grandmother counters, old Hojnik wasn’t ill, his son Johan was in bed with pneumonia when the police looted their house. Old Hojnik was beside himself because the police not only wanted to arrest his sick son, but also to take away his daughter-in-law Angela and his grandchildren, Mitzi and Johan. The police had filled two ox-drawn carts with stolen goods and blankets and ordered old Hojnik to come with them, but with his crutches he could barely walk in the snow. He sat down on the side of the road and said he wouldn’t let them take him away from his farm. So then, the police officers beat him to death with his crutches. Bits of his brain stuck to the surrounding trees, that’s what eighteen-year-old Mitzi told her in Ravensbruck, where she’d been sent after the arrest, Grandmother says. Mitzi and her brother Johan, who had to pull a fully loaded cart, were forced to watch as their parents and grandparents were murdered. Mitzi Hojnik, by the way, was killed on the very day Ravensbrück was evacuated. An SS man was shooting wildly about because he was drunk and Mitzi happened to step out of the line at that very moment. On evacuation day, you understand, just like that, by chance, Grandmother says, her voice rising. She was denied a homecoming. In any case, Grandmother continues after a pause, little Klari, whom the police left behind with her younger siblings, all of them alone on the farm, she refused to leave the house for three days. Pečnica took in the terrorized children who had barricaded themselves in the house, paralyzed with fear. She went and got Klari, ten-year-old Roki, three-year-old Rozika, and thirteen-month-old Mihec and brought them home to the Pečniks.

  Hojnik above Pečnik, Kuchar below Pečnik, the farms one on top of the other and our farm nearby. I stand near the door left ajar and listen.

  As I listen, something collapses in my chest, as if a stack of logs were rolling away behind me, into the time before my time, and that time reaches out to grab me and I start to give in out of fascination and fear. It’s got hold of me, I think, now it’s here with me.

  The child understands that it’s the past she must reckon with. She can’t just focus on her own wishes and on the present. The sprawling present that allows the grownups to survey the past as from a distant shore, the same past that blocked their view of everything then. Childhood is naturally oriented towards the future, but against the backdrop of the past, the future proves lightweight. What could it possibly bring, where will it lead? Isn’t it enough, when it simply makes life possible, thinks Father, and the child occasionally thinks so, too.

  In the books I read, bodies remain intact and rise up to heaven with a blissful expression or are caught as they fall. In our graves, however, it suddenly occurs to me, bodies are always ravaged, destroyed as a warning to those who remain. Here the rashest dissipation holds sway, here life is squandered, here bodies are brought low, it’s a crying shame. One day when I enter our neighbors’ kitchen, Loni pushes me emphatically back out. Help, she screams, help, we need a doctor right away! I see her brother Andi lying on the kitchen bench, groaning. He is as white as a sheet. A kitchen knife is sticking out of his stomach. Andi’s mother screams, don’t pull it out, don’t pull it out, get a doctor, now! When I have just taken my younger twin sisters to Rastočnik for ice cream, Rosi and Filica speed past on a moped and crash in the curve behind the barn. Rosi runs towards me, blood streaming down her face, screaming for help, while her sister lies dying on the side of the road, her neck broken. The echoes of the family’s weeping have barely faded in my mind when Stefan hangs himself, our boarder Stefan, who for weeks has been leaving smudges and drops of blood on all the chairs and benches he sat on. He hangs himself near the door to the stable, under the ramp that leads up to the threshing floor, as if he wanted to dangle right in front of my mother’s eyes, since she is usually the first one in the stalls in the morning. She had a nervous breakdown, Grandmother says as we stand around the kitchen in shock from the news. First, she needs to calm down, and we children must stay in the house until they’ve taken the corpse away. But without waiting for the hearse, we drag the hanged man into the house with our watchful eyes, we pull him out from under the wooden bridge that hides him, we picture to ourselves what he must have looked like, we imagine we’re kneeling on the bridge, peering down between the planks and catching sight of his swaying legs, his dangling, lifeless legs in blue work pants. By the time the doctor arrives, we have already looked down from the bridge several times in our imagination. The way you look from shore into raging water, from life we look at eager Death. Death disguised himself in work clothes. He wanted to remain unrecognized under the barn if possible, pushing the corpse before him without being seen. But we recognized him and felt a hint of his presence.

  Mother cries for days, never again will she be able to go into the stables without fear, she complains, Stefan hanged himself under the barn to punish her, he could have hanged himself somewhere else, somewhere she wouldn’t have been the one to find him. Grandmother says it serves her right.

  Before long our farm is too small and too loud for Death. He finds refuge at the Auprichs’ farm, where he takes cover and is not noticed for a time until the farmer, a friend of my father’s, startles him and shoots himself a few months later. The morning we were told that Franz shot himself in the head w
ith a rifle, but his aim was bad and all he did was shoot out his own eyes, I feel things getting tight, I feel that Death hasn’t given up his attack on Father, but has only taken a detour so he can get closer and ambush him. Father says, now he’s done it, he’s really gone and done it. I think his thought through to the end, which immediately gets me worked up. I think I understand how serious things have gotten and that I have to fulfill my duty. It’s now up to me to save Father.

  After Franz’s burial, I watch Father with suspense. I know that work protects him during the week, but his unease is palpable on weekends. It’s as if he were constantly observing his life and had no idea what he should feel about it. On Sundays, bare-chested, he shaves in the kitchen and washes his underarms with the water brimming with stubble and bits of foam. He combs his hair with an old comb dipped in after-shave. He smells of soap and sometimes, when he catches me looking at him, a smile lights up his eyes like a gentle taunt, like a nod to better times which he has also had, though there is no point in thinking of them now.

  Would I like to know what he’d been thinking at Franz’s burial? I nod. He was thinking that it’s only at a funeral that people realize whom they’ve just lost. Only then do they understand what the person they’re carrying to the grave meant to them, what his true worth as a human being was. When it’s time to say goodbye, people are overcome with emotion, they weep and grieve, but at that point it’s too late, because it makes no difference to the dead whether or not they’re being buried with honor, do I understand? I nod again. A person is honored for the first time, everyone throws flowers on his coffin, they make speeches in which the community thanks him for his work, for the sacrifices the dead man made in his life, but it’s all pointless. At his own funeral, Father tells me, he’s going to make sure he spoils some people’s joy in weeping and wailing, they’ll be stunned, they will realize for the first time that they did him wrong and for the rest of their lives, they won’t forgive themselves for treating him like a mangy dog. He will reject their tears, he won’t relent, no matter how much they whine and plead for his forgiveness, that much he has promised himself, Father says.