Angel of Oblivion (7 page)

Since the whine of circular saws has replaced the mixer’s chewing and, in the woodshed, bags of cement have been replaced by beams, posts, and planking, I can sense Grandmother giving in. Just as the builders are topping off the house with a spruce tree attached to the highest rafter, she decides not to move into the new house. She threatens to tell everyone who asks that she was thrown out.

A few weeks before we move in, the fabric merchant comes by.

Grandmother haggles over blankets, towels, pillows, and sheets – her contribution to the household, she says.

The Gypsy’s van is filled to the brim with bed linens when he brings the ordered goods. He assures us he chose the best pieces for his best customer.

His wife can’t read the cards fast enough because the construction workers are also hoping to be told of good fortunes. The piles of sheets and towels flaunt their white, blue, and golden-red flower patterns on the balcony of the outbuilding and are admired by the recipients for days.

The new house is furnished and occupied.

One evening I hear Father arguing with Michi, who had stopped in to ask how things were coming along. Michi thinks that Father shouldn’t
have cut costs and installed central heating. It’s standard these days and is less time-consuming than heating with a small oven. Besides, Michi thinks a new house without warm water is old-fashioned. Father takes offense. He didn’t want to go into debt, he protests. Furthermore, now there’s running water in the house, so he can forego the luxury of central heating. As he is taken around the house, Michi does find a few things he likes, especially the bathroom and the new bread oven that has been covered with antique tiles.

Mother puts a set of dishes in mint condition into the sideboard, the set she received on her wedding day. She sews curtains and tablecloths for the kitchen and embroiders them with red carnations. She argues with Father over the wooden closet she ordered from the carpenter to keep her books and knitting supplies along with our schoolbooks. Grandmother moves into the outbuilding, and I move into a room of my own with no heating.

The new house is built on a vulnerable foundation. The slope, into which the old house seemed to have grown, has been removed. Where once a path led so close to the back of the house that you could support yourself with your hand on the wall, there is now an escarpment. Like an open mouth from which the jaws were extracted. The new house stands in this gaping mouth with no rear cover and cannot settle down. The badly insulated walls cannot store any heat. The first blotches and traces of mold appear in the stairwell. The old cellar revives memories of the past every time we set foot in it. When the seasons change, it emits strange
odors that try to penetrate into the building above it. The new walls, however, send everything outside, eject all they cannot hold. Waves of odors waft around the courtyard, the musty smell of mold, the sour smell of apples, the sweetish smell of potatoes.

I
’M delighted I can return to the castle in my summer holidays. In Gradisch, I hop up the wooden staircase to my uncle’s apartment and plunge into the familiar mix of smells in the attic apartment. I want to play for hours with my cousins or lie in bed reading comic books.

The summer days have a glittering golden border and more of the color rubs off onto my skin every day. The days are painted with the colors of the flowers in my aunt’s garden and blended in the water of the count’s pond where we swim.

One hot day at noon, Iris, who works in the kitchen, takes Johanna and me to the pond. She is meant to keep an eye on us. In any case, she is older than we are.

We spread our towels on the dock and cautiously slip into the shallow water. Iris lets my little cousin climb onto her back and swims across the pond with her. Johanna squeals and laughs, but the pond’s depths are quickly crossed.

After Iris set Johanna on the dock again, she offers to take me on her back. I hesitate because I can’t swim, but finally picture myself flying across on Iris’s back and I slip into the dark water. In the middle of the pond, Iris suddenly goes limp under me then digs her nails into my shoulders. We sink immediately, tenaciously gripping each other, trying again and again to surface. Iris holds me underwater but her grip grows weaker and when I pull myself up on her and scream for help, I don’t hear a sound from her, not a scream or a groan, I just feel her yielding and I manage to tear myself away. I push off from her and swim, or at least move in a way that resembles swimming, the water around me a gelatinous mass. There’s thudding in my blocked ears. The idea of surviving makes me feel light-headed, she could kill me, I have to swim, I tell myself until I feel the earth under my feet again and can stand. Johanna laughs. I gasp for air, turn, and see Iris floating, curled up, on the surface of the water. I scream for help and run to the castle, I call the workers, they rush down to the pond and pull Iris from the water. Her striped bikini top slips from her shoulders and bares one white breast, a thick light-colored substance gushes from her mouth. It’s what she ate for lunch, says someone who is trying to revive her. The substance is orange now. She drowned, someone says. I killed her, I think. My aunt pulls Johanna and me away. I turn as we leave and see Iris, pale, so white and pale, lying on the sandy ground. I killed her, I think. A doctor arrives and says I shouldn’t see more.

Later, the police arrive, too, and want to question me. But I can’t speak German, I think, I can’t tell them I killed her. So I tell a story, I say we were playing, that she sank underwater out of the blue, that I was able to
get free from her, somehow or other. I run a fever, wake up screaming in the middle of the night, I’m galloping away on a flaming black horse.

The looks people give me over the following days are sad and wordless. They stick to the surface of my body that, like a snail’s shell, is separated from my raw and tender interior, as if my skin were recoiling from the inflammation beneath it. I have landed in Death’s quiver and have heard his breath, felt his maw. Death almost caught me. I’d barely escaped into life, into my scarcely eight-year-old life that had just taken its place inside me and refused to be chased away like a thief. Despite my bewilderment, I feel guilty for having survived.

When I’m brought home, my aunt says that they almost lost me, that I very nearly drowned, she can hardly forgive herself. Mother says, that’s terrible. She says nothing else. I take a step to the side, invisible to everyone there, and watch myself standing on the front doorstep, crying. Am I really crying or am I only thinking of crying? The person that I’m watching or that I am would never be able to express how distraught she is. Grandmother puts her arm around me and says, sleep with me tonight, tonight you can sleep with me! At night, I press up against her so hard that, half-asleep, she scolds me. I hold her tight, as if her bony body were lying next to me like an island in the vast ocean.

W
E are standing in the entrance to the old cellar when I try to recount how the disaster happened. I tell Grandmother a story that sounds strange and dull. The only thing I feel with any certainty is that Iris’s death is overwhelming, that I can neither bear nor understand what happened, and that I’m afraid of the police. I thought they were going to lock me up, I manage to squeeze out.

Grandmother takes my hand. I’ll show you how to act when the police come, she says. With your tongue, you have to make the sign of the cross on the roof of your mouth. You have to make three crosses and repeat that a few times. You see, she says and opens her mouth to show her tongue making a crossing motion on the top of her mouth. In this way, silently, invisibly, she prayed on the day the police took her away and she had to say goodbye to her oldest son and her nephew who were in the house at the time. I crossed myself with my tongue and with my foot, I drew crosses on the ground, Grandmother tells me. You have to pray for a safe return and convince all the powers that be that you want to go home. On the 12th of October in 1943, many of the neighbors who
had been arrested with her died, Marija Mozgan, the Mozgan’s maid, Bricl, Luka Čemer, Miha Kožel, Poldi Topičnik, the men in the Kach family, Jurij, Hanzi, and Franz, the Kach women, Marija and Ana, they all died in the camp. The only ones who came back were the Mozgdan’s daughter Amalija, the Čemer children, Johi and Katrca, Tschik and the Auprich boys, Erni and Franz, Paula Maloveršnik, and Grandmother herself. They were all that was left of the procession led away towards Eisenkappel that day. I also prayed silently during each roll call in the camp, Grandmother says. Once, in the first winter, they had to stand late into the night on Christmas, it was snowing, the women had to endure the cold in their light work coats. One woman was missing, no one knew if she’d escaped or died. They had to stand until the prisoner count tallied. The snow stuck to the women. We were so frozen the snow didn’t even melt, but piled up on our thin coats, Grandmother says. Late into the night, she constantly repeated her prayers and made the sign of the cross with her tongue so she wouldn’t collapse. She was saved, yes, but whether or not she’s glad she’s alive, that she can’t say.

I slowly begin to emerge from my torpor and realize there are disasters much greater than mine. I should stick to Grandmother, I think, since she knows Death, because once you’ve smelled Death, you can chase him away, scare him off, as soon as you feel him approaching. I’m not reassured, just admonished and distracted, spilled like a glass of water that can’t be put back in the receptacle, that has changed and evaporated where it was spilled.

T
HE colors of summer slowly return. They flicker in the sunlit trees and float up from the sun-warmed meadows as we cross them. The hay harvest sets the rhythm to our days and I bury my horror in a remote corner of my consciousness. Despite the heat, an icy shadow flits through me from time to time and envelops me in its darkness.

Uncle Jozi brings two baby goats to our farm for the summer. It is my job to tend them because, left on their own, the two kids would get lost or run away from the farm. One day, when I’m crying, the playful animals discover my tears taste good and lick my face with their small, rough tongues. I can’t help but laugh and from that day on, I bring lettuce leaves to the pasture to lure the kids to me. I give them the run of my face and let them clean my nose and ears with their tongues. It tickles and drives away all dark thoughts. Their soft, light-colored bodies calm my fingertips as they relentlessly rub the kids’ fine coats, trying to absorb some of their whiteness.

Before the start of the school year, Mother sends me to the seaside with a group of farmers’ children. I need to learn to swim, she tells me, and to
get some rest. She lays out all the necessary clothing, stitches my initials into each item, and takes me to the office of the Farmers’ Insurance Association in Klagenfurt where the other children are already waiting with their parents for the bus that will take us to Bibione. On the bus we are each given an orange cardboard nametag to hang from our necks and a large snack to ease the pain of saying goodbye to our parents.

In Bibione, I struggle against an overwhelming anxiety that paralyzes me as soon as I go into the water for swimming lessons. Every little wave that touches my face, every mouthful of salt water that runs down my throat makes me frantic. When the salt water stings my eyes, I fear I won’t ever be able to see again and shoot up from under the water like an injured fish fighting to stay alive. My fear of drowning darkens the sun-drenched days. The colors of the long, sandy beach and the grayish blue of the sea cannot push aside the baleful shadows of the count’s fish pond.

Then, one day, I pluck up my courage and swim in shallow water. My arms and legs move as if revived from rigor mortis, still panicky at first, but gradually more confidently and smoothly. Life looks more promising, I think, as long as I’m certain I can feel solid ground beneath my feet.

I make friends with one of the girls, and as we walk along the beach on the last day I tell her that I have to say goodbye to the sea because this is probably the last time I’ll ever see it. I can’t confide to her that I’ve already started getting used to seeing things for the last time, the glittering ocean of stars in the night sky, for example, or the beach chairs and umbrellas on the seaside, or Father at home kneeling down to repair a chainsaw, or Mother holding up a bunch of carrots as she comes in from
the garden, or the angry, green-tinged lizards I pester with wooden sticks when I’m tending the cows. My friend gives me a surprised look and I can’t explain even to myself why, from time to time, I’m convinced life holds no future for me.

Two decades later, my aunt will tell me as we swim in the count’s pond that Iris suffered from epilepsy and had an attack in the water. Why are you only telling me this now, I will ask her. Because it needed to be said, Vera will answer, whenever she swam in this pond, she always thought of that tragedy. If I’d known, then as a child I’d have been able to deal with the fact that I survived much better and wouldn’t have been terrified every time I went into a swimming pool, I will exclaim. I wouldn’t have lain in dark water for entire nights, alone and invisible, a tiny corpse that could talk and lived among people constantly bumping into her.

T
HE small wood behind our house, which I have to cross on the way to see Michi and his family when I want to watch television, is growing rampant. I thought I knew it inside out. I’ve walked in this wood countless times and could find my way through it with my eyes closed. Now I have to summon all my courage just to set foot in it. I used to think I could smell every section of the path, every little clearing, the places where the trees had grown tall or were still short, and, with my eyes closed, could sense the sequence of hazel, raspberry, and willow bushes, or tell when the canopy of fir trees opened up or closed in above me. Now the wood is no longer familiar. It has joined with the forest and turned into a sea of green, full of prickly needles and sharp-edged scales, with a heaving, surging underbrush of rough bark. As soon as I look out my bedroom window, the wood creeps into sight or lurks with its rippling, jagged surface behind the meadow. I’m afraid it will overflow its banks one day and leave the forest’s edge, flooding our thoughts the way I now feel the forest occupies the thoughts of the men who work with my father or visit us to go hunting with him.