Angel of Oblivion (24 page)

The hesitant, the cautious, the wounded, the horrified, the silent, the distraught will all be at a disadvantage. The politics that brought about the war will deny them compassion. Those wounded on many levels will trail behind. So as not to provoke the majority of its citizens, the
Nazi sympathizers and the German-nationals, the new Austrian state will distrust those who fought against National Socialism. Because, it is argued, what is dubious about their resistance is not that it was directed against the Nazis, what is objectionable about it is that it allowed them to form their own opinions about the Slovenian community’s role in Carinthia’s future, opinions that then had to be respected during the negotiations for the Austrian state treaty, that’s all we need, a law giving generous protection to a minority as a countermove to Yugoslavian territorial claims, according to the wishes of the occupying powers! And all the while, Austria had nothing to do with the Nazis, Austria itself was a victim, didn’t understand what was happening, didn’t join in, it wasn’t even a country in that difficult time. No one in this country so gifted in dissimulation ever welcomed the Nazis, no one longed for the Greater German Reich, no one made themselves guilty, no one assisted the Final Solution, they just took part a little bit in the shooting, the assassinations, the gassing, but that doesn’t count, nothing counts.

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.

F
ATHER 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.