Angel of Oblivion (17 page)

I
N MY final years of secondary school, Father develops a bashful interest in my academic progress and shows it casually and shyly. He looks at my report cards and reads the names of the subjects out loud because the bilingual designations appeal to him. When the snow is high one winter morning when I have to leave early for Klagenfurt and Michi, who always drives me to the bus in Eisenkappel at the beginning of the week, can’t get his car out of the garage, Father gets up at four in the morning and starts to plow the driveways with his tractor. He drives to Michi’s house and, in reverse, pushes the mounds of snow from the access road. Sometimes he stops on the main road and waits until Michi drives up next to the tractor and gets out. The two men share their first morning smoke in the dark and discuss the weather. They are burned in my memory as two shivering men, standing in the drifting snow and blocking my way to school.

When my parents are invited to the graduation ceremony, my father doesn’t want to come. He can’t imagine himself going to a school event,
never, Father says. He is angry with Mother when she goes to the ceremony because, in his view, she is adorning herself with borrowed plumes.

To me, my future after graduation looks only like a white cloud bank, and I convince myself to move toward it, out into uncertainty.

My parents restrain themselves, not a single suggestion passes their lips, they leave my choice of study entirely to me, they don’t try to meddle in something they do not know or have ever taken into consideration. Their daughter should do whatever she wants as long as she doesn’t bring shame on them, because a concept like shame means more to my parents than the word “studies.” They use that word warily, like all foreign words. After months, Mother hesitantly pronounces “theater studies,” the title of my chosen program, and Father doesn’t even try to remember it. When asked what his daughter is studying, he says that it has something to do with plays and that’s enough for him since he doesn’t know anything about intellectual work and would rather not think about such things.

I decide to pursue theater studies because I’m convinced, after seeing many plays, that the stage could become a space for me in which I could face all my complications and despair without danger. The catastrophes on stage are all contained, the protagonists all survive no matter how many times they die. They present their disappointments, dreams, and malice, their love and their hatred, they can yield to their emotions and their nagging fears. A performance has to start with a beginning and does not have to have a happy ending. Yet it always has an ending. The
theater can’t attack you from behind the way life can, even when it flails about. It’s all a game, all up in the air.

In Vienna, I start trying to write again and write in Slovenian as if I could recollect myself, as if Slovenian could lead me back to the feelings from which I have become estranged. A mourning that doesn’t yet know what it is called or even what it is lies waiting to be named, waiting for me to solve its mystery. It wants to be bound to me with words like all the other emotions that swirl nebulously inside me. My sentences are clumsy, as if they were composed of fragments of random letter sequences. They resemble letters that cannot be attributed to anyone or traced back to their senders and don’t want to betray who had written them.

Mother writes that she is considering leaving home. She can’t bear it any longer and is going to find a job.

When I come home for Christmas, she tells me that she talked it all over with Father. He has promised to change, she says uncertainly, as if she were aware this means giving up some of her hopes. She is determined to take small liberties, to go to a spa, join excursions, or go on Sunday hikes. She needs to get away from home now and then and be exposed to new ideas so that she’s better able to bear the weekdays. I encourage her in her new resolutions and ask if she ever imagined living in the city or ever considered a divorce. But for Mother divorce is out of the question.

I
N THE winter of my second year of university, I arrive in Eisenkappel late one evening, wondering how to cover the seven kilometers to Lepena with my suitcases since I had not been able to find anyone who could pick me up and drive me into the valley. I stand in the snow-covered main square and decide to look in the inn where I am bound to find men from Lepena.

As I pass the church, I see Father’s tractor with a trailer parked in front of the Slovenian savings bank. Three sacks of flour lie uncovered and exposed to the cold on the loader wagon. I check the Koller inn, but one of the waitress says he has not been there. So I go the Bošti, a run-down inn with dark, low-ceilinged rooms. I do, in fact, find Father there. He greets me with a loud well, hello there! This one’s mine, he beams, she came all the way from Vienna to get me!

As the men at his table squeeze together to make room for me, the guests at the next table barely glance up. I put my suitcase down, hang up my coat, and give Father a kiss on the cheek. The men pick up their conversation, which I had interrupted. Tine, whom they jokingly call the
General, was just recounting an incident from their time as partisans and they wanted to hear the end of the story. The next table is noisily occupied. The men burst into frequent ear-splitting guffaws.

Tine tells them how, as company commander, he had to leave three wounded men with their relatives in Koprivna. The farmers gave them medical attention in secret. It was especially bad during the last winter of the war. His company had had to evacuate their infirmary in Solčava and they received orders to transport seventeen wounded fighters through deep snow to a distant valley. Three severely wounded men died during the transport that night. I could hardly bear it when partisans died, Tine says, and the political commissars’ mania for control and for issuing orders. They were constantly inspecting everything, they searched his backpack and forbade him from writing letters to his girlfriend, whom they’d classified as unreliable. They meddled in our private lives and issued pointless orders, Tine says. One of the men at our table asks what happened with Peršman, after all, Tine’s company was near the farm. Tine takes a deep breath, yes, Peršman, he says, every day they expected news that the war was over. He and his company had waited near the farm for almost three weeks with two other units. Even then, Tine had thought it was irresponsible, but the commander wanted to wait. The partisans had even been practicing dancing for when peace was declared, that’s how foolish we were, Tine recalls. A man from Globasnitz fell asleep on his watch and didn’t see that SS units were approaching the Peršman farm. Then the catastrophe occurred, just ten days before the end of the war. No one expected it. The partisans had withdrawn
after a skirmish because they wanted to avoid a battle, then an SS unit attacked the entire family. After the massacre of the Peršman family, he had been beside himself, Tine says, the dead civilians from his time in the Wehrmacht in Poland and Russia came back to haunt him, before his eyes, the entire war became a tower of civilian corpses, horrible, he says, horrible! That night everything was mixed up for him, the Russians hanged in the Ukrainian villages, the burned down farms, the smell of burning flesh that spread over the Peršman farm.

At that moment, one of the men at the next table said, that’s a lie, it was the partisans who murdered the Peršman family. How’s that, Tine asks and raises his head.

I suddenly have the feeling that the men at Father’s table have fallen into an ambush.

You did nothing more than terrorize the local population. You all fought for Yugoslavia. You are traitors to your country plain and simple, the man at the next table shouts. You mean we terrorized those in the population who were loyal to the Reich, Tine says gradually getting ahold of himself, that’s something I know inside and out! You still believe that under Hitler’s Germany you were fighting for Austria. For the expansion of German territory, sure, but not for Austria! A free Austria was written off like never before. So is that still your country, the German Reich, even now when you call us traitors, Tine asked threateningly but the man remained obstinate. You should all be called up before a military court, he persists, the English should have locked you up instead of the respectable citizens who did their duty.

The English were with us during the war, Tine counters, we belonged to the Allies, if that name rings a bell! But there’s no room in your head for that, is there? After so many years, you people can’t think of anything to say about the Nazi period other than repeating your propaganda, Tine says in disgust. He should have relied on his intuition and gone home.

So now he wants to go, someone roared from the next table, during the war he would have shot us on the spot, but now he wants to go home!

He wouldn’t have shot you, but I would have, if I’d caught you, a man at our table says with a threatening stare.

Echoes of the war surround us for a moment. The inn is transformed into a battle ground on which the opposing sides are taking stands.

I’ll remember that, the cowed attacker says.

Father is nervous. Tine tells the man at our table who had leapt up angrily, sit down, come on now, sit down!

The next table renews the attack.

And you, Zdravko, the loudmouth says to my father, you were nothing but a snitch. Your stateless president can give you all the decorations he wants. For me you’re just a bandit like all the others.

My heart is racing and I have an overwhelming need to hurl something at the attacker and protect my father, but nothing else occurs to me than to call him a Nazi. You Nazi, I say and I’m shocked by my faltering voice. Father laughs a short, pained laugh and says to the belligerent man, I’m a bandit and you’re a cretin!

I’m going to get my gun right now, the militant defender at our table announces leaping to his feet again.

If you go to get it, you can stay home, the waitress says firmly. I will call the police this instant!

The front is breached. The opposing armies fall back.

I ask Father to pay, wanting to leave right away. Father raises his hand defensively. I’ll decide when I leave, he says. Check, Father calls after a frightening moment and throws some money on the table. The waitress’s hands tremble as she pulls out her pad and adds up the bill. Father gives her a generous tip and tries to stand. He sways. There should be a bag of groceries around here somewhere, he says, we can’t forget it. I hold his winter jacket out for him and point to the grocery bag on the floor.

Well then, Father says after picking up the bag, let’s be on our way! He seems to consider launching another round at the hostile table, but when apparently nothing occurs to him, he opens the door.

We step out onto the street. The main square is empty. I hope no one stole the sacks of flour, Father says as we turn towards the church. The tractor stands in the cold like a forbidding ghost. I put my suitcase in the trailer and Father lets the grocery bag drop with a crash. We climb into the driver’s cab. After several attempts to start it, the engine springs to life. Father’s legs rise and fall like the limbs of a marionette as he steps on the clutch and the gas pedal. His driving sends chills down my spine. I ask him if he has anything against my driving home. For a while, Father drives along the winding curves of the slippery, snow-covered road without answering, then he stops. You want to drive, he shouts, you don’t have a driver’s license or the slightest idea! Be my guest, he says and leaves me the driver’s seat.

I immediately have problems putting the tractor in gear and Father jeers, what did I say, the show-off, doesn’t know a thing, doesn’t have a license, but she wants to drive!

The road is slippery and I’m frightened. Father is getting more and more worked up. He calls me a snitch, Father says, outraged, calling me a snitch and a bandit, I won’t put up with that, I’m going to teach him that no one calls me a snitch or a bandit. Stop, he orders, I have to go back, I have to tell him, Father shouts and grabs the steering wheel.

I stop the tractor and beg Father, who is getting ready to climb out, to stay in the cab. It’s the middle of the night, the other men went home long ago, there’s no point in getting upset about comments by some imbecile. Easy for you to say, Father says. No one can treat me like that, period! He looks at me, his eye wide and gasping for air as if he were suffocating. I stare doggedly at the road, decide not to pay him any attention, and put the tractor in gear.

The steady throb of the motor calms him. As I drive the vehicle across a level part of the valley, where it opens outs and the wooded slopes recede from the edge of the road, Father seems to have fallen asleep next to me. Suddenly he wakes with a start and says, I’ve lost my gloves, my gloves slipped out of my hand. We have to turn around and drive back! I can’t turn the tractor around, I say, we can look for them tomorrow. He’ll go back the few meters on foot, Father grumbles. They can’t be far, he just had them in his hands, he says and tries to stand up. I stop. Father gets out onto the road and says, I’ll be right back. Swearing, I climb down from the driver’s seat and watch Father’s dark silhouette draw away.

The cold grips me like a painful shudder. In the night silence that sparkles around me, the creak of the running engine sounds like a ticking music. The winter night is turning into a fixed image of moonlight frozen on the gleaming snow. Then the layer of snow lifts abruptly as if it were wearing a feathered mantel that rises breathlessly. The stars in the sky are like falling snow crystals or flakes of ice rising further and further into the endless expanse. The valley widens beneath the burning air. A stream’s icy water crackles next to the road.

Father has not returned. I run back along the road and call hesitantly,
ati
, Papa, but the stream swallows my call. Near the end of the level stretch, I notice a dark spot on the embankment. When I get closer, I recognize Father lying on his back on a pile of snow.

Are you not feeling well, I ask, should I get help?

Let me lie here, Father says, just let me lie here. I don’t want to go on, I’m going to stay here. Sveršina showed me how it’s done. Sveršina can sleep in the snow like a partisan and I can too.