Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  Katrca died on the 1st of July, on a Saturday afternoon. I went up to the window of the infirmary with a scrap of turnip in my hand, looked inside and saw that Katrca’s bed was empty, Grandmother says. A Czech woman told her Katrca had been taken away. Grandmother often remembered this and hoped that Katrca didn’t have to live through what happened to Jerči Vivoda from the Lobnik Valley. Jerči was still alive when they threw her on the pile of dead bodies. She managed to climb out of the stack of corpses and crawl back three times to block six. I prayed for Katrca’s death, Grandmother says, and hoped she didn’t go through what the young Jerči from Upper Lobnik did.

  When Grandmother mentions food rations in the camp, she is overcome with a nervous hunger. She opens the tin of cookies again or takes a jar of apple compote from the cabinet in which she keeps several jars of preserves as reassurance rations.

  If she places a glass of grape compote on the table, I know she is happy with the way the evening went. She takes a large spoon from the table drawer, the camp spoon for the top brass she stole from the camp kitchen, she says. Look, she says and points to the engraving on the back of the handle, RAD, Reicharbeitdienst. Then she dips the spoon into the grape compote, lifts a few grapes from the jar, and lets them slide into her mouth. The next spoonful is for me. I close my eyes and open my mouth. Grandmother carefully rolls a few grapes onto my tongue. Sometimes I choke because the spoon fills my mouth. Not so greedy, Grandmother laughs, not so greedy! She took her own camp spoon, too, a simple aluminum spoon, she stores it with the documents, as a piece of evidence, she says, so it won’t get lost.

  Now and again she pulls a gray box of photographs from the dresser. Where has Mici got to, she murmurs as she rummages through the black and white photographs, which are mostly of wedding parties. I look at the photographs she lays out on the bed for me as if from a great distance. Only Mici grabs me as a child, perhaps also Katrca’s melancholy gaze. What interest me most are the photographs of Grandmother as a girl my age. I remark that we look alike. After thinking about it for a long time, Grandmother says, maybe, maybe we do look alike, she’s not sure. The white dress she’s wearing in the confirmation picture is pretty, I say appreciatively and with her finger Grandmother caresses her girlish head adorned with a crown of white flowers. Then she starts to tell me about the worst times in the camp.

  Early in 1945, more and more transports arrived in Ravensbrück. There was no more room in the barracks, the women had to sleep three or four to a bunk. Many women from Poland and Slovenia arrived, many city women from France, Belgium, Holland, good Lord, how those women fought for their dresses and furs, Grandmother says. They sat in the admission block and couldn’t believe their eyes. We were already deadened, Grandmother says, we’d already gotten used to a lot. She was completely emaciated that winter, there was less and less to eat, sometimes nothing for days. She saw women carted away in trucks and brought back as corpses for the crematorium. In the spring, she was selected for the gas chamber at one roll call. For death, my God, I was lying on straw in the typhus ward, waiting to be transported to the gas, and praying, Grandmother says. Suddenly a woman from Vienna said to her, we Austrians have to stick together! We Austrians have to stick together! The woman from Vienna switched her camp number with one of the dead. She told Grandmother to hide and so Grandmother locked herself in the toilet before the transport. It was horrible, Grandmother recalls, there was banging on the door the whole time. It was unbearable. She would never do it again. From then on, she never went to any selection roll calls and hid in the barracks under the bunk bed, barricaded behind the packages that were sent to the women from home. She spent the final days in the camp as a dead person, illegally.

  On your way through life, Grandmother says in conclusion, I offer you this: Never lock yourself in the toilet after a selection, share whatever packages you get from home with others, take good care of the few possessions you have. Things get stolen right and left in the camp. Make sure you get along with the other inmates so you won’t die alone, without anyone to help you.

  As soon as I am in secondary school, Grandmother will ask me to help her write a letter to the woman from Vienna who saved her life. She simply has to find out her address and her exact name, then we can compose the letter, Grandmother tells me. After she came home from the camp, she wrote a few letters, but eventually the correspondence dried up and they lost touch.

  Grandmother pulls a postcard out of the carton. Here, read this, she says and pushes the postcard into my hand. I read: 3/9/1946, Dear Mitzi! Many thanks for your precious words. I’m very happy to hear you made it home safely. How are you? Are you and your children well? Have you had any news of your husband? I am always in the best of health and my boy is lively and alert. He will be four already in June. Dear Mitzi, I was released on February 13th and was happily at home by the 16th. I was very happy indeed to have gotten away from that gang of SS. Dear Mitzi! Do you know what happened to Sabine Bauer, was she still with you? Please write and let me know. I have one more question, do you know Sabine Schwaiger’s address? I’d like to write her. I hope to hear from you soon! Your friend Anna Weilaner.

  I give the postcard back to Grandmother. She smiles. Then she hands me a letter. I have trouble deciphering the handwriting: April 30, 1946; I was only able to answer your card today and would like to send you my sincere thanks. Do you remember the many hours we lived through together, hours that brought so much suffering? But still, we made it – today we are free and can even feel that we’re free! Well then, how did things go for you in Wesenberg? And why did it take so long for you to get home? I arrived in Graz on July 10th. What are you doing now? Are you running your farm again? I hope everything was returned to you! Things are looking meager indeed for me. To date I have not gotten a single thing back from the inventory of my apartment. Do you still have your “best coat”? – Another little momento of Ravensbrück. If the train connections were better we would have lots to ‘grouse’ about. This is all I can manage today and look forward to receiving a sign of life from you again soon. And now I’m going to go have a coffee à la ‘care package’? And we don’t even need to ‘filch’ things anymore! With sincerest wishes, your fellow sufferer, Elisse Siegl, Graz. “Clara Zetkin.” Grandmother smiles again. She has no idea who this Zetkin is, she says, and by the time I could answer her question, Grandmother was no longer alive.

  She sets the camp notebook and the letters on the table, turns off the light, and starts to pray softly. I turn onto my side and press my back against her ribs. After making the sign of the cross, she turns towards me and puts an arm around me. This is her favorite position, she says. She cuddled up with Grandfather like this with bent knees. I press my back against her chest and long for her to hold me even tighter. Occasionally, she pinches me lightly with her hard nails when she wants to show me how they used to squeeze lice. It always went snap when a louse burst, but lice rarely come alone so there was no chance of sleep, Grandmother says. I, on the other hand, fall asleep right away next to her, and in the morning I open my eyes, bewildered. The bed next to me is empty. Grandmother has already gotten up and hurried into the house. When I come into the kitchen, she will be standing by the stove and will say that she feels cold. Then we will drink her barley coffee and sit without speaking, as if we had come too close the night before.

  IN THE evening, the child stands in the field behind the house in the open doorway to night, which rises like a princely palace over the landscape with tinkling, twinkling stars, with the forest’s breath, and the plashing of the stream at the bottom of the valley. She enters the house of night and leaves it again. The child, hovering between past, present, and future, thinks that, actually, she would like to die, that she has had enough of life, and she thinks that she shouldn’t have such thoughts, but she would like to die anyway because death has come so near her. She thinks she should let go of the dead or bury them, the dead she drags behind her like a rickety wooden horse on wheels, even though she has y
et to see an open grave, even though she has only ever seen people on their way to the grave. She wants to bury her dead, the drowned kitchen maid, those who were beaten to death, shot, or hanged, the unknown dead in Grandmother’s stories.

  The child would like to recover the immediacy of things, a state in which no words intrude between her and the world, where nothing she touches pulls away from her. She wants to pluck the words from things, the names buttercup from the buttercups and white nettle from the white nettles.

  She crouches in the grass and doesn’t stand back up. She shrinks to a dark, shimmering stone with glittering sparks of light trapped inside it and shining like water and fire and fluorescing like the air. Her breath draws rivers through the stone, her laughter welling up from the core of the stone like columns of cloud that freeze as they expand.

  The child has turned inward, into the hollow that hides her and keeps her warm.

  THE CHILD who rose from the grass with her awkward, supple body may well have been me, the strange me who discovered crying as a well to wash out of the body everything piled up deep inside it, who discovered crying as a pit cage to descend deep down into the body’s core and bring up to the light the metal that poisons and feeds her. That night, I learn to push through, sobbing, to something warm and velvety, to something dark and light that crushes and reconciles me and lets me see the child who is far away as if she were inside me.

  From that point on, I am the awkwardly assembled girl, it seems to me, the girl with dislocated limbs and overblown thoughts. My arms stick out sideways, my legs, as if badly fitted, hang in the air with a new heaviness. My head is hollow, emptied out for everything and nothing.

  I go back into my parents’ house, crawl into bed, and stare into the darkness. In the morning, I rinse my swollen lids with cold water and walk numbly into the kitchen.

  Through the closed door, I hear Mother say to Father that it’s time to make preparations in case the girl goes to secondary school. She says she spoke with the teachers and the chaplain and everyone agrees that a change of school is a good idea. She already missed the registration deadline once, but the girl could enter the second year class in the fall if she studies hard.

  Father asks what that’s supposed to mean, “go to secondary school,” yet again she’s making decisions behind his back. He is not at all of a mind to send the girl away to school, he won’t allow it. She wants to take the child away from him, that’s all she really wants. Mother tells him to be reasonable, you have to take advantage of opportunities that come with state funding, Michi is sending his daughter to secondary school, too, and his brother’s daughters have been going to the Slovenian middle school for some time now.

  She should leave his brother out of it, Father shouts, he doesn’t care what Tonči and the others do, he’s not going to let the girl go, period, the end! He’s put all his money into the house, where would they find money to pay for school, she’d better not dare spend his money. Then I hear a blow and glass splintering on the floor. I burst through the kitchen door and I stop in the doorway, shocked. Father has broken the pane of glass on the front of the credenza and is holding a coffee mug he had just taken out of it. Mother is standing next to the door and says, her voice trembling, once again you’ve shown what you’re capable of, the girl has to know where things stand, we can’t wait another year. Father throws the mug on the floor and rushes out of the kitchen, she should stop taking him for a fool, he shouts.

  I tell Mother that if Father doesn’t have any money, then I just won’t go to school.

  Nonsense, Mother says and picks up the mug, it will work out. She registers me in the secondary school, and after an entrance exam, I’m enrolled as a student.

  At the beginning of the school year, we take the postal bus to Klagenfurt. On the way to the student dormitory where I’ll be living, I stop and refuse to go any further for reasons that are not clear to me. I yell at Mother, who is becoming embarrassed, that I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want to live in the dormitory and I don’t want to go to Klagenfurt! Mother says, just pay attention to the way, so you’ll know how to get back to the train station. I don’t care, I bawl at her, I definitely won’t remember any of the streets, because I’m going home right now. Mother calls me lojza, which means ninny in our language and is what we say when we don’t want to call someone an idiot. Lojza, Mother says, you’re a complete lojza, stop your tantrum, people are starting to stare.

  I sense Mother’s intransigence and am filled with a bewildered sense of despair. I believe I cannot leave Father alone, I could never forgive myself if he hurt himself, I doubt I can live with the thought that he has spent what little money he has on me. I don’t want that to happen, I think to myself, and can’t hold back my tears. In a sharp tone of voice Mother says, come on, now come along and let’s go!

  In the dormitory, sitting on the bed assigned to me, holding the key to my cubicle, I wipe away the traces of my tears. I look at the other girls kissing their mothers and fathers goodbye and realize that I have never yet kissed Mother goodbye. Mother looks into the room a last time, she tells me she’s discussed everything with the directors of the dormitory and shakes my hand. Make sure you behave, she says in parting and leaves.

  That night I cannot sleep. I feel like a traitor. I wipe away the tears stinging my cheeks on the bed sheets. I am almost intoxicated by the sadness washing over me, which I can only bear lying down. I decide not to give in to this intoxication anymore and resolve not to speak about my feelings and to do whatever is required of me. No one is going to learn anything about me I don’t want them to know. They aren’t going to see through me, would be the right way of putting it.

  First I have to get used to afternoon classes because the Slovenian Secondary School does not have its own building. For more than ten years, they have been hosted in another school building in the afternoon. The German-speaking students hurry home at midday while we Slovenian speakers wait at the side door so that we can enter the school through the basement coatroom. Living in the student dormitory and waiting with the others outside the side entrance makes me a part of the group. I feel like I belong and sense that it will be difficult to hide.

  On one of the weekends I spend at home, Father protests one last time against my being away. At night, after we have already gone to bed, he jolts us awake. Mother got what she was after, he roars from the staircase, this is what she wanted and she has put the girl in harm’s way. Why is it necessary to send the girl away to school, why send her to Klagenfurt now when the bilingual road signs are being torn down all over Carinthia. But no, Mother has to get her way, no matter what it takes. I’m a human being, too, and my voice should also be heard. I am a human being, Father shouts in German.

  It makes me sad to think that I’m the cause of Father’s distress, at least I’m convinced I am and that everything about me is embarrassing and oppressive. My body, tall and lanky after a growth spurt, feels that the speed with which it is growing is inappropriate. I’m also convinced I can no longer wear my traditional provincial dress because, in it, I look even worse than usual, unbearably so.

  I suspect Mother is waging war against my stubborn nature because she sends me to mass every weekend I spend at home. She makes me feel that she only let me out of her care unwillingly and that from now on I am responsible for my own progress, for my own laundry, for my success in school. At eleven-years-old, I bear a special responsibility because I was allowed to leave our inhospitable home, according to her unspoken charge, which, out of defiance or despair, I assume as a burden.

  Mother clings to this last parental duty and urgently works to fulfill it. She believes she has to make sure I meet my obligations as a Christian. That immediately provokes my protests, which in turn reconciles Father with the course events have taken. He abandons his resistance to school and resigns himself to the thought that his daughter’s path through life will always be foreign to him and that he’ll never be able to follow her.

 
GRANDMOTHER and I begin to draw apart. She harbors her strength in order to cope with her growing fragility, and I am heading towards something vague in the future. Grandmother doesn’t try to hold me back. She lets me go in a peculiar, occasionally affronted way. She grows ever more thin-skinned and intolerant. One day, after I’ve decided to kiss my parents goodbye every Monday morning before I leave for the dorms, she stops letting me show her affection. As soon as I bend towards her, she shakes her head energetically and pushes me away.

  That summer I wear a bikini at home for the first time. When Grandmother sees me, she grabs her cast iron pan and envelopes me in a bitter cloud of willow twig smoke. She is furious. I get dressed quickly and go to her room to placate her. Never flaunt your ass or your money, Grandmother says. A young woman should know what becomes her, she says and pulls a dark blue satin dress from the bottom drawer of the dresser. Her Mici wore this dress to her uncle’s wedding. She looked very elegant in it, Grandmother says with a look of reproach. A woman should always adorn herself with a small bouquet of flowers or a brooch. When she went to church, she always carried a few carnations, greenery, and southernwood made into a fragrant bouquet. It smells nice and looks festive. If you dry it and keep it in the closet, it will also keep the moths away, she claims.

  In the open drawer I can see old yellow candles and ornate silver-colored candleholders, a black-lacquered wooden crucifix with a pedestal, as well as white cloths and sheets embroidered with liturgical motifs. In my time, Grandmother says, a bride had to bring winding sheets along with bed sheets as a dowry, so that the household was equipped with all that was necessary. She had recently gotten everything ready for when her body would be laid out and has another piece of advice for me. When you have your period, don’t ever stick paper or anything like that in your vagina. In the camp, a Polish doctor had warned the women in her block against it because a few women died from having put dirty newspaper up inside themselves. She has been wanting to tell me this for the longest time, Grandmother says, but now that I come home so rarely, there was no opportunity. This conversation puts an end to our intimacy. We can no longer be close because she withdraws into her diminishing self.