Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  After you got home you were so scared you couldn’t open your mouth, Leni says. Your neck was full of bruises and your legs covered with blue welts but you absolutely refused to say a thing. Yes, that’s how it was, Father says and falls silent.

  I am completely upset and want to leap up and ask questions I can’t put into words. They rebound through me like a loose flock of arrows, speeding about in all directions and ricocheting off each other. I try to look over at Father who is sitting next to me, but I cannot move my head. I’m afraid to look him in the eye now, it would be an offense against something. His story has become mine, I observe, although in the moment I’m not perceiving anything, I merely have the feeling that he told me a part of my own story. I recoil from this thought just as I shrink away from Father’s story, which I find horrifying and incomprehensible. I turn that incomprehensibility onto my own story and am incensed at having to think such thoughts. I don’t want to have to think about it.

  Leni recounts that, when she saw Grandmother being arrested, she scooped up little Bredica and ran to our farm. It looked as if everything in the house was topsy-turvy and, you wouldn’t believe it, a neighbor was already in the cellar trying to fill a sack with apples, Leni says. That’s why she decided then and there to stay at the farm; they’d have carried off the entire house and cleaned out the stable. In early November, three weeks after Grandmother’s arrest, Grandfather came, accompanied by another partisan, close to the farm and called her up into the forest. That’s the first time I saw my brother as a partisan, Leni says. Grandfather was so frantic about his wife’s arrest that Leni had to reassure him. She promised she would stay on the farm until the end of the war and would take care of his children. Then she collected some sugar, salt, and dried fruit and carried it into the forest. A few days later all hell broke loose. I still wonder who it was who reported that I took a basket of provisions into the forest, Leni says. From then on, the children had to stand guard when a partisan came to the house. In late December, there was a lot of snow on the ground, my brother came back and suddenly appeared in the hut where we prepared the slop for the pigs and where I brewed schnapps with the children. He had come alone via Globasnitz, there had been a gunfight, during which his group had been torn apart and they’d had to flee. One of his friends had been killed. My brother said that it was all pointless, that he was going to turn himself in to the police, that he was bringing trouble on his whole family, that he couldn’t stand this kind of life any more. He cried like a baby, my brother cried like a baby, Leni says. She made him some scrambled eggs and a cup of tea. She gave him clean underwear and dried his clothes. She and Tonči, his eldest son, convinced him not to rush into anything, the Gestapo would send him straight to the camp or would have him tortured, it made no sense to turn himself in, and it wouldn’t bring his wife and foster daughter home. At that, your Grandfather calmed down a bit. Before it got light, he darted back into the forest, Leni says. What times those were!

  It was a dog’s life, Cyril says. As a soldier, he’d gotten used to quite a bit, but the uncertainty, the lack of supplies, the cold, and how they always had to be on their guard … Being with the partisans, he lost his sense of humor even though he sometimes had an itch to pull some shenanigans, but that always risked putting someone in danger. Šorli the courier, for example, just could not give up playing his accordion and running after women. He was snagged by a patrol and fatally wounded at the Wögel’s farm when he tried to jump out of the sitting room window and his accordion got caught on the window frame. He gave up his life for a few happy hours, I suppose. That’s how crazy people were sometimes, Cyril says. He himself couldn’t give up hunting, he just had the itch. He got his hunting rifle from home and then it happened. When he jumped over the damn fence, a shot went off and right through his hand. Jesus Christ, Cyril says. So I had to be treated illegally by the doctor, whereas until then I was the one taking care of the sick and wounded in the bunkers. They had to build a bunker near his farm so his wife could take care of him in secret. His sister had to get bandages and medicine from the community physician who sympathized with the Germans. Naturally, the doctor could guess who the medicine was for, but he just gave it to her and grumbled, as he had on other occasions as well, and didn’t blow anyone’s cover. After my hand had healed, I was assigned to be an escort to the commanders. I knew all the paths and tracks, the neighbors trusted me, Cyril says. The wound was good for something, he had thought to himself, maybe it was meant to happen. After he decided to desert from the Wehrmacht in Finland where he had been deployed with an anti-aircraft battery, he had an old Carinthian doctor in Klagenfurt bandage his arm when he was on leave so he could return home. The doctor looked up at me and asked if he could bandage up my good arm, Cyril says, he didn’t say any more than that. Surely he knew I was planning on deserting.

  To a certain extent, people were completely naïve, Sveršina joins into the conversation. That lasted until they realized that in our valleys, it was a life and death struggle. For a while, the farmers and the farmhands believed the partisans were adventurers they could badmouth. No one had a clue about conspirators. Sveršina says he’d often racked his brains about why so many people from our valleys ended up in concentration camps and why the police were always so well-informed.

  Dear Cyril, Leni says, in all the time since that disastrous winter when you and I were arrested as partisans, I don’t think we once sat down together as long as this. She stands up. You were a brave fighter, aside from that accident with the hunting rifle. You even grabbed the grenade the police had thrown into my house and threw it right back outside. You saved the lives of my children and everyone living in my house at the time we were betrayed. Even if you just stick to your woodcarving now and don’t have any time for us politicals, you contributed a great deal to the liberation of our land.

  It was horrible, Cyril interrupts her, the way they mowed down Primož and tortured you in prison.

  I’m not finished, Leni says and takes a deep breath. She believes that today’s wake is a special one, which Mitzi, her sister-in-law, now laid out, could well have been listening to. She was proud that the Slovenian people did not back down during the Nazi years, that they started to fight for their survival. On certain days she can feel the scars on her neck, back, and bottom left from the Gestapo interrogation. It’s the past knocking on my door, Leni says, it calls out to me and starts tormenting me. That’s when she’s sure that they, the older generations, have the obligation to pass on what they know to the younger ones, so that they don’t end up one day with no memories of their families. She’d like to close, she tells us, by saying that she’s very happy that Zdravko went the whole evening without raising his voice once and remained calm. As everyone smiles with embarrassment, Father’s face freezes. He asks me if I’d like to keep vigil now since he has to lie down. I agree because I hope it will help quiet my mind.

  Leni goes with me to the casket in the living room and with a cloth dries the holy water from Grandmother’s face, which has gotten wet from the many blessings. She changes the candles and backs out of the room, as if she wanted to pay homage to Grandmother one more time.

  I remain alone with the casket and watch the candles’ flickering tongues. A few drops of holy water that landed on Grandmother’s jacket look like little soap bubbles. I can hear the sound of creaking chairs in the kitchen. I open the window and sit back down on the bench near the oven. My thoughts begin to sink into my belly, where they look for a dark place to settle.

  Silence emanates from the bier. Outside I can hear the first birdcalls, they float into the room as a warbling, chirping wave of sound. The birdsong flows around the silent core of the bier and envelops Grandmother in something in which she can return, something that will take her back.

  Cyril comes from the kitchen and says that Sveršina has fallen asleep on the bench. Cyril wants to say more prayers for his sister. He sits at the head of the bier and takes a rosary from his pocket. In silent pr
ayer, his fingers unroll the rosary, bead by bead, sentence by sentence. I stretch out on the bench and fall asleep.

  Mother, who has gotten up to go to the stables, wakes me. She says I can lie down in her bed. I see Cyril still sitting at the head of the bier and stumble, drunk with sleep, into my parents’ bedroom. When I get up, it’s midday. Those who kept vigil all night have left.

  In the evening, the mourners bring more bouquets and wreaths to the house. The sweetish smell of flowers spreads through the living room and turns, by the next morning, into the sharper smell of wilting flowers. After midnight, as the last mourners leave, Father decides to put the coffin lid on because, as he says, she has started to work. The window is opened, and the room is fumigated. Before the coffin lid is brought into the room, Mother approaches the bier and grabs jerkily at Grandmother’s hand. She starts to whimper softly and then says in a voice loud enough for me to hear: When you were alive, you were not good to me, but I always respected you. May God grant you peace. I’ve made my peace with you. Mother’s outburst, which rises to loud sobbing and subsides, disconcerts me. When the men lay the lid on the coffin, Mother tears herself away from the bier. She blows her nose in her handkerchief and begins to pray in a hoarse voice. We are forced to answer her and stand perplexed in the room, which suddenly resembles a bird’s nest on a high cliff, from the opening of which the dead are thrown down into the depths.

  Tschik will take over the final vigil, so that he can take his leave from his KZ companion, as he puts it. The wreath from the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Association with the red triangle in its center rests against the front of the bier and gleams.

  The pallbearers come to the farm early the next morning. The dead woman in her coffin is lifted out through the window and set down on the doorstep one last time so that she can say goodbye to her home and those she leaves behind. Then the coffin is set on a trailer, covered with wreaths, and driven to the graveyard.

  Grandmother’s burial is a solemn one. I move through the throng of people as if I were using my body for the first time. As the coffin is carried through the market square, a pair of warbling thrushes frolic above the funeral procession and the massive wreaths.

  After Grandmother is laid to rest, I am also offered condolences, which surprises me since I had not considered myself an adult. At the funeral dinner, I look at Father, and he strikes me as a man who has just lost his entire family.

  At home I sit in the empty living room that still has faint traces of the sweetish smell of decay. Along with the smell fading from the room, I can feel Grandmother retreating from me. She shifts inside me, as if it were time to part. She stands up, lays her knitting on the table, draws the curtains, closes the door, and walks out from inside me. A tenacious pain settles into the space in me she once filled, a pain that will not yield for a long time. My eyes linger on the primroses outside along the near edge of the field that stretches up the slope behind our house. Everything is about to change, I think.

  On the following day, after helping Mother clean the house and scrub the living room floor, I crouch in a warm hollow behind our house near the forest’s edge. I look down into the valley and wonder if I shouldn’t start writing after all. I could divert words from their constant rotation around me, I could pull them out of their dark course and have them tell my own story, but a story of my own is nothing more than a Fata Morgana.

  AFTER Grandmother’s death, the order of things in our house is reconfigured. Her legacy is distributed. I get her straw hats and kerchiefs, her white linen petticoats, a couple of teacups and glasses, as well as a few photographs. These objects are my body’s fitments, I find, they give me shape for the first time.

  Mother arranges the household according to her own ideas. She buys herself a moped and, when necessary, drives it to the remote regional capital to take care of official matters or to make purchases. She loads her purchases into a large knapsack she carries on her back or into the bags she fastens onto the luggage rack. Little by little, she takes over the organization of the family. Father complains that she is rising above him, but leaves the official and domestic decisions entirely to his wife.

  He begins leading a double life, one life for the neighbors and another for his family. He tries to maintain the illusion for his neighbors that he leads a light-hearted existence. In public, he wants to display his cheerfulness, his confidence, and his diligence. He wants to be considered the hardest worker, the most accomplished and circumspect hunter in the area. He wants to be a daring motorcyclist and the jolliest clarinet and accordion player around. He wants the neighbors to remember him for his extraordinary practical jokes and feats. In winter, even though he does not know how to ski, he lets himself be talked into strapping on skis and barreling down the steep escarpment for others’ amusement. He enters sled races with a heavy old farm sleigh so he can play the clown, swallows raw eggs until he feels nauseous, climbs onto every overloaded cart and up every tree if asked. He drinks to excess because he doesn’t believe in moderation, because as long as he can remember, his life has been filled with extremity, enormity, and transgression. At home, the slightest thing can unsettle, irritate, or exasperate him. He loses patience easily. When he doesn’t understand something or someone contradicts him, he refuses to speak for days at a time.

  After Grandmother’s death, Father stops talking about suicide. The destructive rage he used to direct inward, he now turns outward. When he’s drunk, his body becomes an instrument that emits shrill, ear-splitting shrieks. His voice is catapulted out of his wiry ribcage in every possible pitch and at every imaginable level of intensity. His rages are like the howling of a man condemned to death. In this state, he runs from room to room or entrenches himself behind the kitchen table, which he hammers with his fists. He threatens to show us just how much he’s worth, he will show us children and Mother, we who want only to destroy him. He vents his fears and anxieties, launches his rage against us in a barrage of words that buries us and from which we will arduously have to dig ourselves out hours later.

  Father’s thoughts revolve around death. He is susceptible to destructive tendencies. When he comes home spent or from the Rastočniks’, he begins to fantasize about murders that were committed in the region before, during, and after the War. He shouts that he knows who killed that nymphomaniac Katharina, who was discovered stabbed to death in the Lepena stream before the war, he knows who killed Peternel when he came home after the war, he knows who did away with the partisans in Benetek Valley, he shouts that he feels he’s under threat, he, too, will be murdered one day, murdered by his wife who already has it all planned out and set up, she’s got the pickaxe and spade ready so she can hide his body after she has killed him. He is utterly convinced that Mother is responsible for all his bad feelings. He accuses her of humiliating him as a man, of betraying him, and always saying the wrong thing. She doesn’t understand him and is ruining his reputation with her ways, she has no pity for him. He claims she, the daughter of a simple day laborer, is not grateful enough for the social status she now enjoys from having married into a farming family.

  Mother is far from feeling any compassion for Father. She gives him sullen and reproachful looks because she feels misunderstood and insulted. She makes it clear that he has disappointed her, that she dreams of leading another life, and that she believes marrying him was a mistake.

  Father’s fits of nerves over the years infuse us children like an invisible poison, drop by drop. We watch how he undermines his role as father, how he tries to turn us into sidekicks who have to put up with his raging fury, how he draws us into his old horror and tries to impress his pain on us, pain we can intuit but not grasp, how he wants us to undo his devastation with ours, and wants us to understand that horror is the essence of life. He feels betrayed by everyone around him and betrays us to all those who are ready to credit his suspicions. After the storm dies out and life continues soberly, Father remains silent for days from horror and regret, from the shame or sa
tisfaction of having once again expressed himself fully.