Angel of Oblivion

by Maja Haderlap

  Politics believes the language of war. The politically engaged Slovenians will look at the non-political without comprehension, because they were the ones, after all, who fought for their rights, because they themselves took on the task of being identifiable, of being vulnerable to attack, of being a buffer. They sought refuge in action while those who were beaten down remain silent and refuse to understand why their fight for survival should become a pretext for the victory of an ideology. The revolution: an empty promise.

  Properties are only gradually freed from the war’s clutches. The meadows and fields slowly become willing to give up their dead, the edges of the forest and its clearings to eject their corpses. The meadows will have incubated the dead that nested in them like strange, blackened caterpillars. The fox will no longer be able to gnaw on the legs of the hastily buried. The strips of land along the forest edge will once again be left undisturbed, the meadows will be nothing more than meadows, the fields simply fields. The sheltering landscape will finally have had enough of those using her to hide, it will expose its mountainsides and stretch its bare slopes towards the sun. The landscape’s silence will herald peace for its inhabitants. It will no longer put them to flight, except with rain and cold. The inhabitants will return to the fields and meadows. They will repair the fences and sow seeds, they will replant the shady slopes and thin out the forests. They will regain their foothold on the steep hangs, the dark hollows, the hospitable clearings. They will go back to work in the count’s forests and repair their homes. The forests will take a long time to banish their ghosts because in the forests blood will continue to flow from wounds inflicted on the woodsmen by saws and axes, by falling branches, by tree trunks sliding into the valley – gaping wounds from which blood will flow unlike the exploding wounds caused by bullets and hand grenades. The blood, pulsing, spurting from the fighters’ veins, to the rhythm of their heartbeat, the pus, the fragrant scent of fresh game, the smell of mushrooms and mold, the forest’s coolness, its generosity, the forest can still be benevolent. It can still spread its branches over man and animal, can let exhausted creatures sleep on its branches, it can lay its boughs over the graves of those shot or hunted down and can offer its twigs as a last mouthful. It can keep the peace while roe deer and stags are gutted on the forest floor. The forest cannot weep or moan, the trees only divulge their memory when they are felled. Their memory is kept hidden in their growth rings, in their deformations and burls. The forest grows slowly and with the trees’ long breath it grows from the past into the present, but still it grows.

  Many survivors will abandon their homes and farms. They will no longer want to cultivate their land because they have been marked by the war. They will starve their memories of the war with silence. They will fear being recognized as the wounded and the beaten because that could deepen their shame. Years later they will be afraid of describing their persecution by the Nazis to the former Sturmbahnführer SA, currently an extreme right politician, psychiatrist, and official advisor to the local government. They will be unwilling to submit to the belated examination of victims by their former enemies. The meaning of it all will be lost with the passage of time. Their experiences will be strewn about like garbage, waiting for the proper context. It will be destroyed.

  The others who cannot forget and who will search for meaning in their experiences, will experience defeat. They will not be able to find peace in their own country, knowing that they did what was right. They will be called into question, they will call themselves into question, no one will come to their defense. They will wonder why the Slovenian language always provokes violence. A people welded together and torn apart by suffering. Few will wonder if they betrayed another intentionally or by mistake, out of stupidity or carelessness, out of injured pride or revenge. Many will be consumed with the question of who denounced them, who sent their families into the abyss, and all will sense that suffering cannot be overcome by suspicion and speculation, that it’s better to suppress the shadows of war, to thwart them with marriages and family ties. Life must go on somehow.

  They will pull themselves together, they will celebrate weddings and come together in new families, they will not be able to put mistrust behind them, after the war they will let themselves be persuaded to demonstrate for more justice, for more bread, and for Josip Broz-Tito. In Eisenkappel, they will clash with German speakers, fists will fly, sticks will be brandished, men and women will come to blows. The people from the valleys will swallow the rejection, they will return to their houses and barns, they will never trust anyone. They will never again let politics near, never let politics threaten or murder them. They will wait until their homeland, their country, which abandoned them in their time of greatest need, finally welcomes them, finally mourns their murdered and their dead, finally recognizes their names and shares their sorrow, finally honors their resistance. They will wait for decades. They will note how slowly the wheels of justice turn in this country, how sedately the government agencies move, how negligently and reluctantly traces of the Nazis are erased, but above all, do not rush, do not be conspicuous, so that everything can recover its old beauty, so that nothing will have been, so that nothing will recall the Nazis.

  They will notice that the destruction, although vanquished and subdued, gives rise to strange blooms, reinvents itself, blossoms unnoticed, and cannot give up its fantasies of death. The most insignificant people will succumb to its charms and will shoot or hang or douse themselves with gasoline and set themselves alight. Their families will puzzle over who has sown this despair among them, who has left such darkness inside them. They will bow down before the irrevocable, fathers will beat their sons, the sons will despise their fathers, husbands will forbid their wives to speak.

  The properties invaded by the cold will begin to crumble, but those who have left are unable to leave their fear behind. They will dream of small, modest joys, of the opportunity to find work and rest, of earning enough to get by, of marrying, of raising children. They will feel as if they have finally escaped the unhappy times. Only now and then will they be caught short by pictures of parents deceased or killed, by flashes of memory that strike them to the core. They will have a sense of being brushed by ghosts, of needing to close the curtains and sit down, after a time they will rise numbly and open the window to take in the world, to delight in the passersby, in the houses and flower-covered balconies, in the streets or in the stillness of their rooms. They will feel overcome by the present and will store their wounded faces in a box, will pack them away with the faded photographs, and will don their Sunday faces radiating confidence.

  FATHER will take up the challenge and will return to his parents’ home. With Grandfather’s help, he will replace the windows and doors, the roof. He will put the first animals in the orphaned stall. The war will have transformed him. At twelve, he will have the feeling of being on intimate terms with violence and the fear of death. He will wake up screaming at night. He will hear Grandfather’s curses, and when the partisan officials stop in to persuade Grandfather to send his boy to school, Father will refuse to go. He will be able to work in the forest with his father. At fifteen, he will cut a gash in his knee with an ax and on his way home, alone, will faint several times and almost bleed to death. He will lie in the hospital for weeks and, immobile in his cast, will be tossed out of bed by a boisterous fellow patient. His parents will give him new clothes. His new suit will not go with his clunky, hobnailed shoes. He will learn how to play the clarinet and will perform for weddings. He’ll be the life of the party, as they say, will buy himself a motorcycle and a leather jacket with the first money he earns and will use the motorcycle to go to the Slovenian agricultural school in Föderlach, after all. He will go to school and write papers on crop cultivation and animal husbandry and forestry.

  He will perform in plays, he’ll stand on the stage in the rectory and mimic an innkeeper wearing a false moustache and a white apron, he’ll play a police officer who doesn’t threaten him. He doesn’
t know if he’s any good at theater, he will say right after he’s brought the house down yet again, after he has slept off a binge.

  He will get his hunting license and will no longer go poaching in the local hunting grounds. He will fall in love and want to marry the young Karla. We need a good worker on the farm, Grandmother will say, because it’s time to pass it on. On his wedding day, he will feel the cold rise within, the paralysis that had gripped him as a child, the sense of alienation, the fear of being one of two, of three, or of four. He will have the feeling he has married a servant who is incapable of helping him, he won’t rejoice as he did on the day of their engagement, won’t invite his wife to dance, won’t seek her out when she locks herself in the bathroom and weeps. He will want to hurt her, to push her away, from the very beginning, so that everything will stay the way it is, so that his wife will learn despair and her love be put to the test. He will work in the neighbors’ woods to earn some extra income, for years he’ll spend the cold winters dragging logs with his horse from the Count’s forests. He will watch his children playing and not know if he should fear them or cherish them.

  He will sit with the neighbors and tell them stories, how he stepped on a wasps’ nest, how he fell out of the pear tree, how a splinter of wood hit him in the eye, how his hunting dog caught a badger, how a fox plundered his hen house, how he hid the dead hares from the hunters, how he escaped a horned viper, how a wild sow blocked his path, how lightning struck the fir trees, he will tell them about the wood grouse he hit and the enormous stag he missed. He will plant his fruit trees, as he learned, in places sheltered from the wind and will track the streams of cold air. He will prune the apple trees to help them form beautiful crowns. He will graft new shoots onto cherry and pear trees, he will store the prepared branches, bound in cloth, in the cellar and, in the spring, he will cut and graft them onto the stock. After spreading sealing compound over the clefts and binding them with cloth, Father will talk to the trees and encourage them to accept the scions. He will decide the layout of the fields, haul out the manure, and plow them. He will rub the earth between his fingers to see if it’s too moist or too dry, if the soil will crumble or break into clods. He will draw straight furrows with the reversible plow and will call out to those manning the winch to tell them when to turn the motor on or off. He will harrow and sow the seeds, he will reap the grain and bind it in sheaves. Later, he will stop raising grain and will let clover take over his fields, he will sell his horse and buy a tractor, he will check on the gestations of his three cows by touching and palpating them, he and Mother will watch over the calving cows all night, he will spread clean, dry hay on the ground and wait for each calf’s front feet, its head, and will go get Pepi if the head does not appear and the calf is turned upside down. He will wipe mucus from the newborn calf’s muzzle. He will slaughter two pigs each year, dazing the animals with a stunbolt gun, then cutting their throats and collecting the blood in a pan so it can be taken to the kitchen. He will scrape the pigs’ skin, will hoist them up by their hind legs, cut off their heads, slit open their stomachs, pull out the entrails, hang the intestines and the serous membrane on a hook, saw the animal in two, and pat the animal from top to bottom, praising it all the while. He will carry the intestines to the stream in a wheel barrow, where they will be washed clean, scraped with a piece of wood until they are translucent, the light-colored tripe then placed in the white bucket, a viscous rope. He will take the animal turned meat to an unheated room and will cut it into pieces. He will pat the layer of fat, the shoulders, the back, he will caress its stomach, what a fine animal, what good meat. He will add his special seasoning to the cut and ground meat, hoping his sausage will be good this year, that his ham will delight the palette. He will distill his plum schnapps, day and night he will feed the fire heating the still full of mash, he will control the cooling, will taste the distillate, will keep his eye trained on the fire for the second round, so that the middle step, the very heart of his passion for distilling schnapps, will proceed slowly. He will carve the number of liters into the stillhouse wall with a knife. He will build wooden fences and gates, he will mow the grass and bring in the hay. He will repair his tools, replace the handles of his pitchforks, cut the wooden tines for the rake with a spokeshave, on his carpenter’s bench he will sand planks and baseboards, spread glue on the edges, he will sharpen his scythes. He will build a house.

  His work done, he will cross the courtyard and sit down on the front doorstep or will nod off at the kitchen table. He will feel worthless and deprived of speech. His headaches and stomachaches will turn him into a groaning body that gets in its own way and would like to get rid of itself.

  He will watch his children, he won’t push them to work, won’t issue a single order, now and then he will ask them to do something, he will leave the commands to his wife, he will delight in their efforts, will resign himself to their stubbornness, he won’t take them seriously, will court their affection, and will believe them lost because of their youth. He will lose confidence and be happy when anyone is friendly towards him, he won’t forget any act of kindness, will be astonished by it, and will be touched by any show of helpfulness and respect.

  He will believe in death because death, like violence, can change everything. He will want to throw his life out of the window, as he will put it, let’s throw ourselves out the window, clear out, let’s laugh, drink, work ourselves to death. What could possibly happen when he climbs up on his tractor, dead drunk, and drives away, when he tries to pull logs through an impassable section of the mountainside with a cable attached to his tractor and the front wheels lift, so what if he uses the circular saw with only one good eye? When will they finally feel sorry for him, when will they appreciate all he does?

  If only he didn’t suffer from this inertia which takes more effort every year to overcome. He can’t move, he doesn’t know how to beat the resistance within, the torpor that holds him captive. How do you withstand the deterioration you bring on yourself, the withering of the body?

  As soon as his strength begins to wane, withered branches start to appear on the fruit trees, their crowns thicken, the new shoots wither, the number of animals in the stable dwindles, the fields he had been leasing are reclaimed by the owner. As soon as he gives up his work in the forests, the farmers’ felling strips turn into clear cut slopes, on which the logging seems more like pillaging.

  He will give up hunting, unable to keep up with the young ones or hit the prey having only one good eye. His bee colonies become infested with mites, the floors of the bee-houses are littered with legs of bees, bits of wax, mutilated insects. He will take the bees one by one and will scrape the mite larvae from their crumpled wings, an abdomen will detach from a thorax.

  One summer day, he will finally lay his resolve as a farmer to rest. I will spend that Sunday with him.

  HIS favorite cow was about to calve. He and Mother could not agree when the animal should be brought down from the summer pastures and housed in the stable.

  On that Sunday morning, he wants to check on her but can’t find her. He calls and paces up and down the pasture, he notices that the fence has been torn down near a steep, dangerous drop, the grass and bushes are matted down, he calls to me to come with him. We have to go down, he says, the cow might have fallen into the gulch when the labor pains set in. We slide down the steep slope, holding onto the hazel bushes and rampant goat’s beard, and find the cow lying in the stream, its legs folded underneath it, the calf protruding half way out of its vagina, cold and lifeless, drowned on its way into life, the mucus washed away by the cold water, its slippery coat ashen, drenched. Father groans and pulls the dead calf out of the cow. How long has she been lying in the water, he laments, how long. The animal tries to stand up and looks at us pitifully. Father wraps his arm around the cow’s neck. Stand up, stand up, he begs the animal and it rears up, but its feet and fetlocks collapse. She has a fever, Father says, we have to get Pepi and pull her from the water.


  When Pepi arrives with his tractor and realizes he and Father won’t be able to pull the cow from the streambed alone, more neighbors are called to help. Father stands with his shoes in the stream, soaked to his knees and shivering. I lay my forehead on the cow’s face and see faint white steam rising from its trembling back. Its eyes emit such a profound creaturely sorrow, the men will not look at the animal because the sight will remind them of something they cannot bear at this moment.

  I stumble home and return to the scene of the accident with rubber boots for Father. In the meantime, the men have tried to get the cow onto its feet, but its injuries from the fall are too serious. Pepi says they will have to shoot her, there’s nothing else they can do. Father blows his nose into his handkerchief. He’s weeping. Go get your gun, let’s get it over with quickly, he asks of Pepi and lays his hand on the cow’s curly forehead.

  Pepi gets his rifle and when he’s standing in the water he says to Father that calving cows cannot die, he really doesn’t want to do this, only out of friendship will he take care of it, though it’s unbearable.

  I turn away, I don’t want to see any more.

  Right after, they haul the dying cow out of the water with the tractor and drag it to the street, the dead calf and afterbirth are placed beside it, and a tarpaulin is spread over this misery.

  The men go home.

  Father says he doesn’t want to do this anymore, he will never forgive Mother for leaving the cow in the pasture so long, even Pepi had wept when he had to shoot the cow.

  It’s already dark when Mother arrives home. She gets off her moped and hurries into the kitchen. She saw the dead cow and the calf on the side of the road and stopped, she says, panting, she called the cow’s name and the animal lifted its head and looked at her, Good Lord, she saw a ghost, Mother continues, her heart shrank, how could this happen!