Angel of Oblivion (22 page)

Father recalls that Tine, whom they called the General, once told him at Kovač’s place in Ebriach how Gašper, Županc, and Žavcer had been searching for Communists in Carinthia, but in vain. At one of the partisans’ general meetings, they concluded that if there weren’t enough Communists, well then, they’d have to create some, so they admitted a few activists and fighters into the Communist Party. There were training courses, a few women activists and fighters even passed the entrance exam, a few others remained candidates. The General remained a
candidate until the end of the war. A good fighter, but not suited to the class struggle is what a colonel wrote in his report. After the war, he went back to Carinthia, to his farm, Father says. In Ljubljana, they wanted to make him a functionary. They gave him new clothes and a lot to eat, but he gave it all up, as did a few others he knew well. Jurči, a fellow hunter and partisan from Lepena, described how things went at an illegal political gathering after the war. The partisan functionaries demanded the annexation of southern Carinthia to Yugolavia and called on the masses to vote for revolution. Jurči thought that was a bit much. Did we thrash the Nazis so we could now embrace the Communists, he wondered, that he would never get, no, he couldn’t get his head around this all or nothing, Mother of God, it only brings misfortune, Jurči would say.

T
HE IMAGE of the unknown partisan from the valleys could be redrawn and freed from the armor that hides his many faces.

A partisan must ally himself to the landscape in which he fights. He has to take on the region’s colors and forms, he must become invisible, he must be a mountain and a stream, a spruce tree, a house, a hill, a forest, an owl, a snake. He must camouflage himself with the meadows and wrap himself in a coat of foliage. He melts into the paths, into the air, he can appear now here, now there, he can be everywhere at once. He was spotted in this village yesterday and today his shadow is flitting over a distant mountain he is circling. He must defend his house, his land, his own little homeland. A partisan must move like a fish in water. In the water of men, in the human water the enemy is trying to dry up, because the civilian population, unlike the partisans, remains visible, recognizable. A partisan can engage in civilian activities during the day, but under cover of night he has to run and strike. A partisan does not sleep, he has made night his day, he fights to break the enemy’s morale, he flees because flight is his triumph and his success. Fear is his
brother, his sister, his name, because fear of death can make him endure anything – hunger, disgust, loneliness. The fiercest despair can save him, false wisdom can destroy him. The water in which he swims can carry him and feed him, with mouthfuls small and large, with fatty and lean meat. Without this water, the partisan would perish, he would be left high and dry, he would choke in the mud. It is the air he breathes, it is his vulnerable body. This body will be caressed and beaten, loved and hated, used and abused, felt and dreaded, cherished and broken. It is his extended arm and his stiff leg, his strong heart and his weak flesh. It is his dearest friend and his best enemy. The partisan will give his body a new form, a new face, he will pull it out of oblivion for all to see. Its determination will give him strength. His body’s wounds will spur him on, his injuries will drive him, his despair will embolden him. He will be the shout that escapes his body, he will embody the voice that speaks for him.

As soon as the war is over, the unknown partisan will give back to the landscape all that belongs to it. He will take off his camouflage and will move about amongst humans who have become human once again, who will have regained their former appearances, he will be unrecognizable in his resemblance to them. At night, he will weep for the dead, during the day he will do his work and will glorify peace. He will place peace above all else and will leave triumph to the victorious armies. His sense of honor will grow from the certainty of having repulsed humiliation, of having said no, of having drawn a line between himself and injustice. His fragile hope will lend him a face, a monument will be built in honor of his desire to live.

Or will the partisan push revolution to its bloody end, will he continue the fight after the triumphal procession, will he celebrate victory with a slaughter of revenge, will he turn peace into a perpetual war of suspicion and wipe away the bloodbath with murder a thousandfold? His victor’s statue stands abandoned in the field, the safety catch on his weapon released, surrounded by ghosts.

I
N SLOVENIA, I stop asking myself if anyone around me is annoyed when I speak in Slovenian as I used to do in Carinthia. If it were not for the anxiety in the air caused by the threat of a possible war, I could get used to the delightful, leisurely pace of the Slovenian language, to its ambling, nimble, playful movement.

After a year, I move back to Carinthia. I am drawn by feelings of belonging and troubled by the political contradictions. I still dream of reviving the moribund conversation between Slovenians on either side of the border and begin to work in Carinthia on founding a cross-border literary and cultural magazine, but the project falls through.

While I’m in Klagenfurt working in theater, the Slovenian language begins to withdraw from my writing. One day I will realize that it has disappeared completely from my notes and sketches, it has moved out of my desk drawers, has packed up its most beautiful clothes and left. Offended and tired of my dallying, the beauty has stormed off, I think
to myself the day I notice the change. I will wonder if my thinking has changed with this language’s departure, if, along with this language that grew on my lips there wasn’t also a chain that grew in my hand with which I could pull the world towards me, and so in losing this language, have I lost my grip on the world? Should I have abandoned that indeterminate, insecure land between languages sooner, that land through which I wandered for a long time, a land that required no absolute decisions like choosing to write solely in one language or another?

Outwardly, everything will remain the same, just as it had been. The Slovenian books will remain on my shelves. I will not forget the language nor will I discard or disown it. Nothing will be displaced in the silence. But something permeable and impalpable will have broken. Only the verses of my poems will have slipped into new attire, will have gone to look around elsewhere, because they wanted to escape the no-man’s land behind the border.

My desire to write will slacken. My enthusiastic plans will falter. Words will lie scattered around me, as if I had flung them on the ground in a fit of despair and couldn’t bring myself to gather them up again. I will feel like I am sitting on a pile of rubble.

But before things reach that point, I find myself standing on Republic Square in Ljubljana on the evening of June 26th, 1991, watching the new Slovenian flag being raised for the first time in honor of the independent republic. I keep repeating a sentence in my mind, trying to engrave it
within me: this is a historic day. But what is it I see in this moment laden with symbols? The historical dimension as an excess of imagination? My joy is muted with worry that the Yugoslav People’s Army might occupy the border posts that very night. I return to Austria before midnight. In the morning, the Slovenian border is, in fact, occupied by the military. I feel like I have escaped. After paralyzing days in which Slovenia stands on the brink of war, the Yugoslav People’s Army retreats unexpectedly from the new republic.

T
HE THREAT of war in Slovenia almost makes Father lose his mind. From the early afternoon on, he sits, slightly tipsy, at the kitchen table, grumbling that those people over there in Slovenia have obviously forgotten what war is. He wants me to do him the favor of keeping my distance from all this! Indistinct and long repressed fears take hold of him. For days on end he is overcome with agitation and convinced that everyone has abandoned him.

In a book I learn about post-traumatic stress disorder and am almost relieved to apply the unwieldy medical term to Father. That must be it, I think, this will help me cut through the thicket of personal and political intricacies. On the other hand, can a word change anything about an illness? Is it at all possible to disentangle Father’s anxieties, to divide them into nerve cords, cell nuclei, and synapses?

What a strange concept, that the memory of a state of anxiety can span gaps in time and synaptic clefts and reach into the present, causing it to be experienced as alien and unreal, as if the only true reality
occurred back then, a long, long time ago and everything happening now is simply a distraction from the essential.

I read about the dwindling of empathy in the now, about the sense of being imprisoned in one’s body in whose metabolism the past has become trapped like a germ of memory, a living microbe that takes possession of the individual in certain situations, invades him and cuts him off from the present.

Father is reborn through the recollection of past suffering, if it is, in fact, suffering and not just a drunken dance of shadows. He compulsively reinvents then rejects himself. His state of extreme tension relaxes only when he drinks, when his body descends into a state of stupor and disinhibition, where borders dissolve, when he becomes a soft mass drifting aimlessly in his consciousness. Only then can he breathe and eject all that is tangled, piled up, frozen within him. A human volcano.

Anxiety is the fundamental difference, the divide between him and us. It forms the internal core of his survival and admits no feelings for us. As soon as he feels such emotions, he pushes us away. His life seems to be concentrated and intensified in those moments when alcohol takes away his reserve.

In Father’s landscape of branching and deformed anxiety that sometimes appears from the outside as much more vast than it could possible be in reality, in this countryside a word from me cannot venture alone. I cannot assume that the solitary word I send on a journey will reach the core of his anxiety, that his anxiety will approach the word and identify
itself. Father’s anxiety will not want to call out, this way, word, this is where you must aim. It won’t let itself be subjugated to that extent and submit to some designation or other. Father’s feelings will destroy any language or words that approach him, just as his rages render me mute, his bellowing always conquers my speech.

Sometimes, when his depression stretches out over several days, I begin to suspect that his native landscape might be provoking these disturbances. He acts as if he does not want to see the familiar meadows and mountainsides, as if he would rather retreat to his house and not set foot outdoors, avoid contact with the proliferating vegetation. Is it the landscape that reminds him of the former battleground now threatening to crush him?

Yet how remarkable it is, too, to fight behind the stable, to fall on the potato field or under the cherry tree, to be discovered in the cellar, how strange to be buried under an elderberry bush or under the old fir tree. How strange it is when war enslaves a landscape.

T
HE WAR breaks out in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Croatia. I hear Father, I hear many neighbors and acquaintances complaining in the first months of the war that they can’t bear to watch the news on television, that they aren’t able to watch war movies either, that they simply cannot bear such films. The horrifying din of war, the grenades, artillery fire drills into them, they lie sleepless in bed for hours and hours, they toss and turn, they can’t help thinking of those poor people, running from their burning houses, it’s all too much, do the politicians not understand what it means to be in a war?

The memories of the residents of these valleys begin to revolt, they rise up and take over. After the end of Nazism, they still knew their stories, they told each other what they had lived through, they could recognize themselves in another’s suffering. But then the fear sets in that they’d be excluded because of their stories and seen as alien in a country that wanted to hear other stories and dismissed theirs as unimportant. They know their history is not mentioned in Austrian history books, certainly
not in Carinthian history books in which the region’s history begins with the end of the First World War, is interrupted and takes up again at the end of the Second World War. Those with stories to tell know this and they have learned to stay quiet.

Now, however, they dig up what they remember, pull it out of the sack, let it fall as if casually, in the hope that someone listening will pick it up. There could be someone out there who wants to learn more. It’s about time.

Admittedly, no one is asking at all insistently about their past. Those who do ask are circumspect, as if they didn’t want to touch old wounds, as if they were afraid of learning too much, perhaps even about their own families. Very quickly, the old fear washes over those about to tell their own stories, the worry that these stories could be used against them, could revive buried antagonisms, could betray friendships, or could make them appear suspicious somehow or other.

And so these almost-storytellers quickly stuff back into the sack what they have let fall and act as if their remarks had slipped out by mistake, a blunder, they won’t open their mouths if there are strangers in the room. I am considered a stranger, I know that.

And yet, a few of these silent men and women are waiting only to be asked for their stories to come tumbling out. They don’t know where to begin, the force of their memories disconcerts them, they stumble from one person to the next, from year to year, cannot follow the chronology, confuse names and places, assume that everyone knows what they mean. They talk about ghosts, about farms and smallholdings that no longer
exist, that were overgrown with brushwood or razed to the ground long ago. They can even recall the stories of others, all the things that could have happened, the things they had feared most.

When the erratic narratives become too much for me, I wonder why these stories crumble to pieces in the tellers’ consciousness, with no connection to a larger context, as if each person were left with his or her own war, as if the isolation of the witnesses were part of oblivion’s strategy. I start asking questions and searching for connections. What I hear eats away at me. It merges with the childhood stories trapped inside me. I am constantly circling the abyss of history into which everything seems to have sunk.