Angel of Oblivion (20 page)

When I move to Vienna, she starts reading literature and puts aside her Catholic horror stories. She reads historical novels, travel writing, books about the Second World War, but also Tolstoy, Flaubert, Lipuš, and Handke. Right now, I’m giving modern literature a try and I find it puzzling, she writes in a letter, but at least I’d like to give it a try. She never had the chance to go to school, but it would have interested her,
she writes. She starts writing poetry and gives me her rhymed verses to correct when I come home on vacation. She believes that in life you have to pull yourself together and write stories with endings. It’s also important that morality has pride of place because where would things lead if there was no one to show us how things could be.

When Grandmother was alive, Mother was almost never able to talk about herself. She sat next to those telling stories from the past and was never asked for her own. Her family’s stories were considered insignificant, nothing very bad happened to her mother during the war, it was said, of course she’d had to raise her children alone as a day laborer, but that was nothing unusual. In the Slovenian convent school where Mother completed a one-year home economics course, they drummed into her head that she must only read chaste, pious books and never pick up the works of depraved writers. Such reading could corrupt a young girl, she was told. She must not read the Slovenian weekly newspaper
Slovenski vestnik
, which the Catholic Church had proscribed because it extolled the partisan tradition. A Slovenian-Carinthian should wear a headscarf whenever possible and not watch any Errol Flynn movies. Very few of the students must have followed these precepts, but my mother wanted to lead a model Catholic life.

Everything seemed to go wrong from the beginning. She remained chaste, certainly, but not long enough. She followed the injunction to marry the first man who approached her, but the reality of marriage fell short of her expectations. Even her children, not long after they were toddlers, developed minds of their own, which left my mother angry
and disillusioned. She observed the virtues of temperance and frugality, and not being able to follow the latest fashions made no difference to her. Because there was no money in our household to buy a car and, in any case, she believed a fast vehicle would be too dangerous for Father, she settled for a moped and drove it to church, to do her errands, on outings and visits with her friends. She and her moped became inseparable and sometimes, when I saw her returning from her rides, it seemed to me she was recapturing her lost youth. Her eyes shone, her strong, weather-beaten hands were bursting with energy. She looked like a bold young woman for whom her children were pests and her husband a failure.

Mother has decided to wage one last battle with me because she instinctively feels that I am not on strong footing. She bets everything on the maternal card and loses because, in truth, she never was and never could be vindictive. She abandons her plan to move to Klagenfurt and holds me responsible. I should be aware, she tells me, that it’s only for my sake that she’s staying in this miserable situation.

Father, on the other hand, shows his sympathy. When I see him in public and he has, as we say, assuaged his thirst and then some, he proclaims, almost shouting, so that everyone can hear, that one’s mine, she’s a dear one! Since our tractor ride through the frigid winter night, he has turned the Hitler salute into our secret, almost intimate, handshake. If he’s in a good mood, he greets me with “Heil Hitler” and takes a perverse glee in the bystanders’ reactions. He lets me cut his hair and, as soon as he thinks it’s time for another cut, he sets a chair in front of the house, lays
a towel over his shoulders, and smiles contentedly when I take his thin hair between my fingers.

His phases of exhaustion are ever more obvious. Ever since he almost lost his left eye in a work accident in the forest, his injuries have been multiplying. He slashes his index finger with a saw, he opens a gash in his leg with an ax. He wants to keep up the frantic and agile pace at which he had always worked and is distressed that he no longer has the necessary strength or stamina. He is diagnosed with emphysema, which he refuses to admit because he does not want to give up cigarettes. Smoking is his elixir of life, he claims. Some days he feels the same as he did back then, in the forest, famished and exhausted after running for days on end, when his companions would give him dried leaves to smoke. That’s the only thing that got him back on his feet, he’s not going to give it up now. The only concession he’s willing to make is agreeing to smoke filtered cigarettes. That will slow the disease a bit, he thinks.

The war invades my nocturnal space.

Huge trucks patrol the access road to our farm. Ambulances, sirens wailing, race between a distant hospital and the invisible battlefield. The house on the high plateau has disappeared. I am homeless now, wandering throughout the land of my childhood, to which I’ve been banned.

During the day, I cling stubbornly to my poems and my scholarly writings.

At night, I sail to Libya to get Mother where she has gone for a cure. The sea is stormy and dangerous. When we dock our sailboat, I see Mother waiting on a golden throne covered with jewels. She has come down with a fever. Her health is worse than it has ever been. I am very worried about her.

I
N THE so-called “commemorative year” of Austria’s annexation to the Third Reich fifty years earlier, Austria officially offers the surviving victims of National Socialism a reparations premium of 5,000 schillings.

Father’s cousin Peter comes to visit and draws his attention to the sum. Peter tells Father that he must realize he, too, is a victim of the Nazis.

What’s that supposed to mean, a victim, Father asks as if someone had tossed him a hot potato he would like to drop as quickly as possible. He’s had enough of this circus, he says. He went to Klagenfurt a few times with his mother, back then, after the War, to testify in court against the police officer who had tortured and mistreated him. The officer sat in front of him, and Father was asked if he recognized him. The officer had looked at him, and Father didn’t say a thing. He doesn’t know why not. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He thought to himself, the hell with him, I’m not saying anything.

I look at Father, astounded. What good would it have done, he asks to calm me down.

When Father receives his premium, he takes advantage of a moment when we are alone in the kitchen to whisper that he wants to spend the money only on himself. What good was all that suffering! Just to hand the money over to Mother for the household? He wants me to take my brother’s car, now that I have a driver’s license, and drive him to the dentist in Prevalje so he can get his dentures fixed.

One day in late August, I drive Father to Slovenia. The roads in the southern end of the Jaun Valley are lined with cornfields and swaths of blackened, overripe sunflowers. In the orchards, early apples rot under the trees. Wasps pursue their wild, frenzied dance over the sparse fruit. Father stretches in the passenger seat and looks at the countryside. His eyes prod the pastures and fields, as if he expected the fruit, plants, and vegetation to offer information about the length of autumn or the severity of the coming winter.

We cross the border at Bleiberg and drive to Prevalje via Poljana.

In the dentist office, there are two of his countrymen who also want to take advantage of the less expensive fees. Father says he would much rather have a Slovenian dentist rummaging around in his mouth than a Carinthian one, because Slovenians don’t run out of patience as quickly. His dentures haven’t fit properly for weeks and have been hurting him. He wants to have them fixed, finally, he can’t bear it any longer, he tells me while waiting his turn. When he is called in, I tell him I’ll wait for him in a café across the street.

Father shows up after an hour. It was rough going, he says. His bottom dentures have to be redone and it took forever to get a proper dental cast. I think we deserve a good lunch, he says, don’t you?

Before leaving Prevalje, he buys ten cartons of Yugoslavian cigarettes in the town’s largest store. Ten cartons, you really want to smuggle ten cartons across the border, I ask in surprise. Why not, he says, I have to spend the money on something. He can get the cartons past the customs officers.

Outside Prevalje, we turn onto a gravel road that rises steeply through a small forest. Higher up, we have a beautiful view of the landscape on both sides of the border. Father knows the local inn, he stopped in with his hunting friends once on the way home from Šmartno, where they had been invited on a hunt. We order pork roast and look around the small, low-ceilinged room. A few villagers sit drinking at the next table. Father gives them a nod and says that they serve a good roast pork here. A man at the next table asks if we’re from Carinthia. Yes, yes, we’re from the land of Carinthia, Father says and orders another beer. The owner joins the next table and Father and I are soon caught up in the local talk, even if we have nothing to add and don’t necessarily want to hear it either.

Father waves over the owner and tells her with a grin that he’d like to treat everyone to a round. What are you celebrating, the owner wants to know.

Nothing special, Father says. The round is on me, he calls out to the locals and smirks as if he’d just played a prank on them.

Father is relaxed when we leave the inn. It occurs to him that he could buy some tools at the Slovenian co-op in Bleiburg. The pitchforks and axes at home haven’t been in good shape for a long time.

We approach the border. He lights a cigarette. Now we’ve got to come up with some good lies, he says and coughs. After checking our passports, the Slovenian customs officer waves us through. The Austrian asks if we have anything to declare. Nothing, I tell him, but Father says, a pack of cigarettes and waves the pack under the officer’s nose.

Open the trunk, the customs officer says. Now it’s serious, I think and feel slightly lightheaded as I get out of the car. When I open the trunk, the customs officer immediately discovers the cartons of cigarettes under the wool blanket and pulls them out one by one. Our smuggling attempt fails. Father, who acknowledges ownership of the cigarettes, is called into the office. He must hand eight cartons over to customs and pay duty taxes on the remaining two. They told me I should be glad I got off so lightly, he says,
porca duš
, he swears as he gets back in the car. That went to hell, blast it, that really went to hell, he says and trembles as he stuffs what is left of the money in his wallet. As if I hadn’t suspected, he grumbles, the officers at Lavamünd aren’t as strict. At Holmec, they’re bored, they don’t have anything else to do. After this fiasco, he can do without the Slovenian co-op in Bleiburg, too. He wants to go straight home via Globasnitz.

During the drive home, the afternoon lends the sun a warm golden tone that plunges the Jaun valley into a limpid melancholy. The light has
softened all garish tones and heralds the end of summer. I look at the Peca, our local peak, which I’m skirting in a half circle, with astonishment because its north face looks downright soft. On this side, the Peca is a big-bellied mountain, a long sloping pile of sand, overgrown with woods and green meadows. Blocs of limestone rise from its extended back giving the peak a more severe air. Small green domes and cones cluster around the Peca like young animals crowding around their mother. This is where the Alps end, here the steep white flanks lose their provocative hardness. Behind it, the landscape of tangled and intertwined hills extends like an impregnable valley of canyons and wooded domes that have lost none of their reclusive and rebellious character.

After the little village of Globasnitz that huddles up against a wooded slope on the southern edge of the Jaun Valley, we turn onto a narrow gravel road to the Luscha saddle pass that the locals use as a supply road. This single lane road is making me uneasy, and I pray the entire way that no vehicle will come from the opposite direction. Father senses my worry and to reassure me, tells me not to be afraid, he often drove this road on his motorcycle without lights and he always made it home. What should we do with the rest of the day, he mutters. We could stop for at bite at the Riepl, if Flortsch is at home. What do you think?

After we leave the pastures on the Luscha behind and pass the ecumenical church that Flortsch had built by the side of the road and that always rises into view unexpectedly like a rockslide, we see our neighbor Johi Čemer in front of the church. He waves us over.

I stop and get out of the car with Father. Johi laughs. What has dragged you up this way? He’s just making his daily rounds, Johi tells us and offers his hand. Father tells him about the dentist and that customs confiscated eight cartons of cigarettes. Goddamn customs, goddamn it, he says and spits.

Grinning, Johi says he’s glad he quit. Now that he doesn’t have to worry about cigarettes any more, his lungs work like well-oiled pumps, he can go up and down the mountains as often as he’d like without a problem. He cuts the hay by himself, does all the work in the stalls, too. He can’t complain. My engine stutters noticeably, Father says, drumming on his chest with the flat of his hand. At some point it’s going to seize up and that will be it for me. Not at all, Johi says, you’ll be around for a while yet. You’re a tough one! Just think about how much you’ve been through already. Not long ago, he was reminded of the day the police tracked them from bunker to bunker like two strays, do you still remember, Johi asks. That’s the last day he saw his father. When the police dragged him down from the forest because they’d beaten him so badly, he could hardly walk, his father came out of the stables and threw his hands in the air from sheer fright. The police wanted my father to tell them if my mother had joined the partisans. Of course he acted as if he didn’t know, then he was arrested and sent to Dachau where he died, Johi says. When he came back from the youth camp Moringen at the end of the war, everything was different; the house burned down, the stables cleaned out, half his family murdered. His mother came back sick from the partisans. The first thing we had to do in our new life was forget the old. First, learning the A B Cs of
forgetting, that’s a hard school, isn’t it, Zdravko, Johi asks Father while looking at me.