Angel of Oblivion (21 page)

Did you get money, too, my father asks.

I have a small pension because of the camp, you know that, Johi says.

Yes, of course, Father replies and repeats that he wants to get his dentures fixed with his payment. That will be it for his pocket money from the government, gone like it was nothing, he says.

To steer the conversation away from the past, I ask where the border with Yugoslavia runs. Both men stretch their right arms out and point towards the south. The border runs over that ridge there and continues behind the pasture on the other side, they answer.

In the very last days before the end of the war, he had been all over the area with partisan couriers, Father recalls. They’d been running for days from persecutors who were on their tracks. Fresh snow had fallen in late April and soldiers who were retreating from the partisans in Styria were streaming over the Luscha pass. His group had almost fallen into the hands of a few police officers who had come up from Globasnitz. He knows this area like his back pocket, Father says, but it’s covered with trees now and you can’t see the high pastures on the Luscha anymore. That’s how life is, Zdravko, Johi says, everything gets overgrown. He thinks about life when he’s alone. He wanders over the meadows and fields, looks down into the valleys or up at the mountains and is grateful that no one killed him back then. He often wonders what became of those who denounced the locals – the farmers, the women and children,
the elderly – and betrayed them to the Nazis. He let the question of nationality drop on the day he and his neighbor were denounced to the police by a spy from Slovenia. The fact that a Slovenian went to the police and told them this or that one was working with the partisans, the fact that someone believed it was right to deliver people – his own people – made him even worse than the Germans who started from the principle that they were a master race and so had the right to rule over others, Johi says. He doesn’t understand how you can denounce people just because you think they’re all Communists and should be killed or something. No one needs to tell me anything, I don’t care if my children speak Slovenian or not, Johi tells us he has stopped worrying about it. It’s not my problem, he says with a smile.

Father doesn’t answer. He stares at the ground and draws on his cigarette.

Everything was settled after the war and nothing was quite right again, Johi says, that’s how he tries to see it. What Hitlerism was he understands perfectly well, and he is glad to have survived it. Sometimes, when he’s out walking, he looks at the spruce trees above the scarp. That’s where the partisans killed the farmer Keber because he supposedly had something to do with his neighbors’ deportation. It’s at moments like that that Johi prefers the worst of peacetime to war, because in wartime everyone goes insane and there’s never justice in war, not ever, Johi says.

Yes, Father sighs. His father showed the family where Keber had been buried so his body could be dug up and interred in the cemetery. Grandfather was never able to come to terms with Keber’s execution.
A lot of things from his time with the partisans weighed on his mind as long as he lived, Father says. He was disillusioned after the war and loathed politics.

But neither your father nor your wife’s three uncles who died fighting with the partisans went to war to fight against Keber, they fought for something else, Johi says. I look at him, surprised, because I have never heard him talk like this before and because I am amazed to hear for the first time that three of my mother’s uncles died as partisans. Three woodcutters who decided to desert from the Wehrmacht, and no one in our family ever thought it worth including them in the family history, as if my maternal great-uncles vanished into thin air, as if they had cloaked themselves in mist so they wouldn’t be recognized or suspected of doing anything, so they could disappear from history without a trace.

Johi announces it’s time to check on his animals and gives me a kiss on the cheek. Father and I are to wait for him and then accompany him home. His wife will fix us something to eat.

Father says he’ll think about it and offers Johi his hand.

When we are alone, my father starts off towards the spruce trees above the scarp. Once we are up top, he takes a few steps to the right and to the left and circles the few trees that are scattered about the steep meadow. Climb up here, he says, I want to show you something. He comes to a stop and taps the ground with his foot. Right there, that’s where they stuffed him. From his jacket pocket he pulls a small candle he probably picked up near the church steps and lights it. When I reach him, we sit on the grass. The sycamore leaves are already changing color, Father says after
a while, autumn will be here soon. We look at the valley below and are silent. The votive candle’s small flame burns behind the red glass until it imperceptibly fades.

I
N MY thoughts, I follow the line of the border as it runs between the Luscha’s alpine pastures and Mount Olševa, it rises and falls, a wavy line meant to check those passing from here to there, a law written, engraved in the landscape.

Ever since I can remember, I have moved within the border’s magnetic field. Those who want to feel safe should respect the border, we are told. There is no point in retelling old stories because they could put our peace at risk. But is the peace in this region truly ours or do the languages spoken here still wear uniforms? Has peace become visible? Can a Slovenian place name stand next to a German one, a symbol more telling than a dove, a rainbow, a monument?

Because of the border, which, in the eyes of the majority of people in this country can only be a national and a linguistic border, I am forced to explain myself and declare my identity: who I am, to which group I belong, why I write in Slovenian or speak German. These declarations have a shadowy side haunted by specters with names like Loyalty and Treason, Possession and Territory, Mine and Yours. Here, crossing the border is not a natural act, it is a political act.

After I finish my dissertation and my second collection of poems appears, I move to Ljubljana. My Slovenian writer colleagues debate, dream, and talk a democratic Slovenian republic into existence that will make everyone forget the Communist decades. They want to extract the Slovenian Republic from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and lead it towards independence.

In the times of political upheaval in Slovenia, it is clear to me that I am observing the crisis as a guest, and I feel like a distant relative visiting her family after a long absence who is surprised to see that they have changed. I realize, all of a sudden, that I only know the political reality of Yugoslavia from literature, from a few personal stories and visits.

During the meetings of the writers’ association, I ask myself why I feel so weak, so muted in the fight for the so-called apotheosis of the national, for the national state. Why, although I wish for the Slovenians to have their own state, with all my heart in fact, do I still hold myself at a distance? As a member of an ethnic minority, as it is so ineptly put, I have always been engaged with national questions. Why such reservation? Because the efforts made by the Slovenian speakers of Carinthia to ensure public respect for their language were directed at Austria and represented an encouragement for greater openness throughout Austria. They were not related to promoting democracy in Yugoslavia or in the independent state of Slovenia, which did not yet exist.

I experience my hesitation as a liberty but also as a loss because I don’t feel under any threat, even if I understand the political crisis and share the Slovenian writers’ goals.

In the past my family engaged with questions of nationality when they felt themselves forced to react because being part of their community put them at risk, reacting according to national lines was a matter of survival. They could either forget their language and their culture and adopt German or they could resist and suffer the disastrous consequences. They decided to join the resistance movement from Slovenia who were organizing the fight. At the time of the greatest catastrophe, they joined forces with the Slovenian segment of the European fight against Fascism. They believed in the future, in the liberation and unity of the Slovenians once they found themselves, as a result of Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany, without protection in a state that wanted to expel and annihilate them. Which Austria should they have believed in? In the one that did not exist at the time, that did not defend itself and joined in with National Socialism, that threatened one part of its citizens and delivered the other to the forces of extermination?

And me, what do I stand for? Is there such a thing as engagement along national lines or is it a chimaera?

In Slovenia, the Communist Party is dissolved and with it the myth on which the Party based its right to single party rule – the myth of the partisans and the liberation front. New light is shed on the historical account of the Communists’ seizure of power within the liberation moment and this new illumination reveals ever more dead, those purged during the partisans’ battle, post-war massacres of military and political opponents,
along with innocent civilians when the partisans returned from the forests and joined the Yugoslav People’s Army.

After a public event, a historian asks me how the Slovenian Communists in Carinthia would respond to these revelations. I explain to him that, unlike in Slovenia, the Communists in Austria are not in power. Yes, he says, he knows that but the equation partisan equals Communist must exist in Carinthia, too. That’s what those who are against the partisans claim, I answer, the equation is wrong.

I cannot help but think of the partisans in our valleys, who look like scattered forest rebels from the perspective of centralized power in Slovenia. They have nothing in common with the partisan iconography, the oversized imagery of steely warriors storming forward that determined the partisans’ image for decades in Yugoslavian and Slovenian public opinion. Our partisans, in contrast, look like erratic boulders left behind by revolutionary history. Since only the Communists’ merits could be praised in Yugoslavian and Slovenian post-War historiography, it is obvious that the other partisans – the believers and non-believers, the apolitical and the half-hearted, the disappointed, the skeptics, and the disillusioned – are absent from the general awareness.

I tell the historian that I come from the Carinthian side, where those involved aren’t blinded by hero worship. They probably would have liked to indulge in it, so they could forget their war wounds and finally
experience some recognition. As soon as the partisans come out of the valleys and enter Carinthian public opinion, they are immediately transformed into tragically distorted figures. The moment they leave the safety of their four walls, they find themselves in enemy territory. They have to fight for their historical victory as if it had never been their due.

At a family gathering, I ask Tonči, who was three years older than my father when he fled to the partisans, how Grandfather, a devout Catholic, dealt with the Communists. Tonči says the partisans never challenged Grandfather’s religious faith, all that mattered to them was that they could rely on him as commander of a unit of couriers. It would never have worked otherwise in Carinthia, the majority of the Slovenian speaking community was Catholic. When Grandfather would go with Žavcer to recruit for the partisans at some carefully chosen farms this and that side of the Peca, the farmers said they were glad to see the Slovenian army, finally someone who was on their side! They liked the partisans’ uniform, but the red star on the cap, not so much. Many of them would have been willing to fight for the emperor because there were fewer problems in the time of the monarchy, they said. But in late 1943, when a victory over the Nazis appeared ever more likely, many of the farmers and laborers said they would be willing to help. Later, when you could feel it would be only a matter of months until the Third Reich had to surrender and the partisans were considered part of the Allied Forces, the partisans no longer asked for support, they demanded it.

We had to keep lists of how many pigs or cows we took from which farms so that people could be compensated after the war, Tonči says.
Some of the smallholders themselves didn’t even have enough to survive. Their provisions had run out. He knows of families who were starving because a large unit of famished partisans was camped not far from their remote holding. How could we have managed without the local population? No partisan group could have survived in Carinthia without their help. Where would they have gotten their supplies or their information, Tonči asks. There was no supply line following the partisans with provisions, no one setting up camp stoves in the bunkers. The food came from the local population, there was no other source. In the so-called “beggar-patrols,” you had to be very careful not to take more than was sustainable, Tonči says. How often he had hoped that the packages dropped in by the Allies would contain food as well as weapons and medical supplies, especially food. That’s what they needed most urgently. Most often we held in our hands new automatic weapons we didn’t know how to use. In the courier base Grandfather led, rosaries were said regularly, even in front of the political commissars, Tonči says. The politicals knew we couldn’t go home and that those who prayed presented no danger. The commander of the First Carinthian Unit, Franz Pasterk-Lenart from the Lobnik Valley, went to Father Zechner to ask his counsel before he deserted from the Wehrmacht. He couldn’t go back, he said, he could no longer reconcile this war with his views. They prayed through the night in the church and, the following morning, Lenart joined the partisans. When his mortal remains were brought to Eisenkappel from Mežica, the priest said at his graveside that with Lenart, one of the most exemplary Catholics in the area had fallen. For the partisans, undecided young men were a much greater threat than the faithful, Tonči explains. Men
who wanted to try out the partisan life but left because they couldn’t take the miserable conditions of living on the run, because they had to put up with injustices, harsh punishment, because they found it too dangerous, too arduous, too hard to bear. They often betrayed everything, were tricked by the Gestapo or even were sent by the Gestapo to infiltrate partisan ranks. It cost many lives, brought on disasters, and spread mistrust among the fighters. A good partisan was a partisan out of necessity, Tonči says, someone who had no way out but to hide in the forest, someone under the threat of arrest or the KZ, for whom there was no choice but flight because he had been betrayed as an activist, because he had given aid to the partisans, or had deserted from the Wehrmacht. Deserters from the German army were the best fighters, accustomed to military discipline, they were fighting for their own survival, for their families’ survival, and they always had their last bullet in reserve, in case they fell into the Germans’ hands. As for the politicals, those who were educated, they were partisans out of conviction and so had political roles, but overall they were a minority, Tonči says.