Graz is for me a city in which people vanish. By this I mean just what I say, literally and without qualification: Graz is for me a city in which vanished people are at home. Even this sentence, once spoken, vanishes; it’s vanished. I strain to hear it, the twigs snapping beneath my feet. After all the rain of the last few days the Andritzbach is a rushing stream: it swallows every word that you say in passing.
*
I was four years old. Daddy’s girl. He called me his little lady. A twinkling eye, my reflection in it. More than the house we lived in and its naked walls, it was this gaze of his that gave me shelter. It surrounded me, dark grey, like a skin, firm and strong. It was only much later that I discovered even the thickest skin is penetrable. A sharp-pointed object is all it takes to jab through into its soft inside.
Once upon a time, however, my father’s gaze was my home. I say: once upon a time. Like in a fairytale. A long, long time ago. Father would lift me up onto his shoulders; carry me down the Zösenberg in his seven-mile boots, past the foals and the kid goats, up to the source. We were a two-headed giant. Father would tell me about the Schöckl witch, her shaggy hair, the dark water hole from which she spat hail, about a single hailstone said to contain one of her hairs. It would bring fortune and happiness to whoever found it. Which is how I know that happiness is something you must seek out. And also: that it is something you might never find.
The source is a spring. It is said that there is a castle immersed in it. The nymphs that once watched over it were drawn up onto land and beaten to death. Forever forgotten, the castle’s treasures; forever faded, the song of the nymphs. Father said: “When the light slants through the trees and falls on the water, then amongst the water parsnips, the marsh plants, you can still see a hint of gold. And when the wind rushes over the stone walls you can hear a distant lament, like the passing of time.’ I held my breath, hardly daring to exhale. I desperately wished I could hear it. With Father’s hand on my back I stood there, my cheeks puffed out. Whenever I let my breath out it was as though I had just missed the crucial moment. It doesn’t matter, laughed Father: ‘Here at the beginning of the world, everything comes together at some point.’ This was our secret. That here, at some point, everything would come together.
There are other places I remember. Meadows and woods without names. Of all these places, however, it is the source, damp and dark, which I associate with the unmistakable feeling of once having been small. Sometimes I dream about it, and on waking shout out a word I no longer recognise. It comes from deep down, draws me downwards and for seconds I see myself, face down, drifting through floating insects. I carry the image around with me all day. In some way, it dreams me. Not the other way round.
At the beginning of the world there was just us, Father and I. We threw pebbles and counted the rings. Chewed on blades of grass and collected snails. Even after they had drawn themselves back into their shells, a slimy trail gave them away. We rarely talked about Mother and when we did, it was always very quietly. ‘She’s got a headache,’ whispered Father, ‘she has thunder and lightning in her head.’ His whispers grew fainter, then stopped altogether, and there was silence. It lasted so long that I could no longer say whether she existed at all. The hand that fell limply from the sheet. The hand that didn’t move, in the dark of the room. And the dusty sunrays glimmered through the drawn blinds. The hand in the sunlight that suddenly remembered it was alive, suddenly stirred, grabbed a bottle from the bedside table. Frantic gulps. A long, drawn-out ‘Aaaah!’ Then silence again. The hand dropped to the ground. The bottle with it, it rolled under the bed. The noise it made when it finally stopped rolling, the gentle clinking, this was what I understood by ‘mother’.
I could go on. The boxes of tablets, for instance. When they were empty, I was allowed to play with them, use them as toy blocks. Here’s one for you. Mother’s tired voice. Every now and then she would beckon me over and be amazed at how big I’d grown. Like a distant relative. Squeeze me to her breast, so tightly that I was almost smothered, the pungent smell of her mouth. Let me go again; fall back onto the pillow, as if she were utterly exhausted from giving me a hug. That’s enough for today, she would say: ‘I just can’t manage any more.’ And: ‘shut the door when you go. But gently, please.’ At the age of four I had already learned how to shut a door gently. I can still do it today. You don’t forget something like that. I tiptoed across the hall to the front window. When the clock struck four, Father would appear from behind the shrubs.
It was he who woke me in the mornings. He who dressed me and tied my hair back. Who made my snack, bread with butter and jam. Who got me into the car and took me to kindergarten, standing in the doorway, giving me a kiss on the cheek. Our neighbour Frau Drechsler brought me home with her daughter Maria. It’s just too sad, she would sigh whenever she saw me, and pause, as if to lend weight to her words. For the rest of the journey I would feel her watching me in the rear mirror, her eyes burning into me. Maria asked me whether my mother also drove a silver Mercedes. I nodded: Yes, kind of. And somehow it was true. Mother drove and drove and drove. Her hair tousled by the wind. Drove away. In her bed, which could have been a silver Mercedes.
What I wanted to say was: It was Father who made me soup in the evenings. Who taught me to ride a bike and swim. Who told me stories about the white lady who had dissolved into a cloud of smoke. Who tucked me in and stayed with me until I fell asleep and one day woke up again.
*
I was six years old. Winner of the spelling competition. The first prize was a fountain pen. ‘All of Andritz is proud of you,’ the teacher had said, and I remember that, coming from her mouth, the word ‘Andritz’ sounded like the big, wide world, all of its cities and villages, its mountains and rivers. Frau Drechsler, however, seemed disappointed. ‘Next time,’ she said to Maria, ‘you will have to try a bit harder.’ And to me, with a lopsided smile that didn’t really want to be there: ‘I’m sure your mother will be very pleased.’
At home at last, I slipped silently out of my shoes. Mother’s door was just ajar, I could hear her weak cough. For a moment I wondered whether I should go in and show her the fountain pen. But then the weak cough turned into a thick, husky cough. I heard her hand, her slender, vein-streaked hand, stretching out to the bedside table, knocking something over, clutching it greedily. Frantic unscrewing. The moment had passed. Once again Mother had broken one of her thin promises: ‘Tomorrow I’m going to make you some strawberry pancakes’.
In the kitchen I found a spinach lasagne in the fridge. I put it in the microwave and turned the dial to two minutes. As I glanced around, I saw the table, its checked oilcloth, the breadrolls left over from breakfast, and a note, its edges turned upwards, strangely alone next to the breadbasket. I picked it up, spelt out the words. There was an F. And an A. and an R and an E. A crooked W. An E. An L. And another, silent L. Beneath: Father. I read: Farewell. The microwave purred. It went ‘ching!’ Runny cheese. Over and over again I read the same thing, without understanding what it meant. The note was crumpled from being read, clutched in my hand.
The clock struck two. Time to take Mother her digestive tea. She liked it lukewarm, with two heaped spoonfuls of sugar, the bag left in. A shot of rum. She said: ‘It sets me right.’ This is how come I know that rum and being set right are two closely related things. And also: that the shot of rum, if it was a decent one, would earn me ten schillings pocket money, a huge sum that would buy me a Twinny ice lolly and a bar of chocolate at the Scherwirt.
‘Mother?’ She barely stirred. Only the rise and fall of the blanket betrayed the fact that somewhere underneath was a person, breathing. I set down the tray, repeated: ‘Mother?’ and prodded her gently so that she wouldn’t get a shock. She liked everything to be light, almost imperceptible, like the touch of a feather. ‘Good,’ she propped herself up, ‘you are a very, very good little girl.’ And as I started to cry: ‘Na, na, na. Don’t cry.’ I held the note under her nose. She blinked, read with a squint Farewell, looked at me, then back at the note, now with her eyes wide open, and broke into laughter. At first restrained, then loud and uncontrolled, never-ending peals of laughter. ‘So he’s done a runner after all,’ she laughed: 'He’s only gone and left us.’ The sentences bowled out of her laughter, were steamrolled by it, thick mucus, until there was only her laughter left, the laughter of a person who has just woken up to life, a laugh that bounced off the walls, a laugh that filled the room, the house, the street, I thought it must fill the whole of Andritz. I raced out into the hall, dug into my bag for the fountain pen, looked at its pointed end, stabbed it into my arm. A reassuring pain. I cried out, and my cry broke into Mother’s laughter. It toned down then, if only for a few seconds; I took a little of its raw sound away.
*
I was eight years old. A bearer of scars. My left arm was laced with stab wounds. I told the school doctor: 'I sleepwalk, I fell into some brambles and rosebushes in the night.’ I told him this with the same air of nonchalance that my mother used for the people from the youth welfare office, when she told them that she hadn’t had a single drop to drink for more than a year. And even if what she said was only a half-truth, it was at least true that her condition had improved a great deal since my father’s disappearance. Whenever I asked where he’d disappeared to, she would answer: ‘Over the hills.’ For me it was clear that she meant the Reinerkogel hill, and so Father, I was dead certain, had gone down the Jakobsleiter steps and into the city. This, however, was an unattainable place, far, far away in the haze, a round-the-world trip. I knew nothing more than a few streets, Prochaskagasse, Radegunder Strasse and Ursprungweg, apart from a couple of other insignificant side roads; I saw the city as a place as remote as Paris, New York or Hong Kong. Inconceivable that I would ever go there; inconceivable that this would ever be possible.
My father was not the only one who vanished. Maria’s father also disappeared around the same time; ran off, Frau Drechsler informed me with a wry sneer, with a lover ten years younger than him, blonde of course, slim of course, no wrinkles of course, and, if you please, a non-descript, rustic beauty. ‘I hope they’re happy,’ she added, as happy as you can be on Earth. And because I yearned for a similar kind of happiness for my father I had the idea of finding him a lover in our area, in the hope that he would maybe come back over the Reinerkogel and to the source, the beginning of all things. I had seen him often enough from the front window, only then to realise that it had been an illusion. A mere shadow, nothing more. And often enough I had passed the horses and the goats – like me, they’d got a bit bigger – on my way to the source in the wood, only to make the terrible discovery that the person sitting there was a toothless old man with snow-white hair.
My search for a lover began at school. There was the headmistress, Frau Grottenbacher, a terrible name; I ruled her out straight away. There was the R.E. teacher, Frau Kubacek, who was supposed to have had an episode with the priest, whatever that meant; the teacher from 3C, Frau Walter, who chewed her nails incessantly; and the secretary, Frau Böhm, whose legs were so long that they spanned half the world. I chose Frau Böhm.
Since Frau Drechsler was ‘currently no longer in a position to collect us from school’ – Maria related this to me as though she’d learned it off by heart – we, at eight years old, had to take the bus home. An opportunity, I seized it. Having fobbed Maria off with a tale about stomach-ache, I waited for Frau Böhm, peering out from behind the bins in front of the school until she came out. I followed her, maintaining a distance of ten paces, until she stopped briefly, continued, and then slipped off into one of the terraced houses on Popelkaring. And there I stood. Day after day. For a whole month. Without the courage to ring on the doorbell. Hid as soon as a curtain twitched, ran away as soon as her face appeared. One time on the street she turned around to face me. Looked at me as if I were a ghost, kind of scared somehow, hurried on, in a panicky sort of way, on her long legs, I following her, out of my mind, wanting to call out her name, to touch her sleeve. Suddenly, somehow nothing like the Frau Böhm I knew, she stuck the key into the lock, shaking violently, and hastily disappeared into the house, in one movement, gone. This time I rang the bell, I don’t know how many times. But the door stayed shut and so there was nothing else left for me but to go home, with hanging head. The next day there were rumours that Frau Böhm had suffered a nervous breakdown, a few days later that she had upped sticks and moved back, lock, stock and barrel, to the Mürztal, her home region in upper Styria. Which is how I came to know that home is something to do with the nerves. In each of us it is a nerve, a nerve strained almost to breaking point; the nerve that, when the time comes, will yank us back to our source.
*
I was fourteen years old. A forgetful teenager. At some time between eleven and thirteen, when the womanhood thing began, there was a point when Father was no longer a person, but more a vague memory; I’m almost inclined to say a non-person. Of course I still waited for him, on the dot of six, but this waiting had become an empty ritual, just like the piercing of my skin first with one and then another sharp point. It was simply a necessary part of the day as it slid into the night. Mother would look at me standing by the window, call me a hopeless case and, ‘just this once’, one of her favourite refrains, gulp down a gin. This too was a necessary part of the day, sliding endlessly into the night.
At this point I should perhaps mention that it was quite a while since our neighbour Frau Drechsler had driven a silver Mercedes. She now drove a Skoda. Her daughter Maria had starved herself down to skin and bones, thin as a rake, going slowly downhill until they had to take her out of school and put her in a clinic in the south of the city. A city that, at any rate, had shifted much closer in my perception. I had discovered it was only a bus and then a tram ride to the Hauptplatz, the main square in the very centre, and from there you could easily get to the Griesviertel area, or Lendplatz or the Stadtpark. And I had also discovered: it was absolutely nothing to do with magic.
Most of all I liked to cycle into town with the wind streaming through my hair. Pedalling away next to me would be Klaus-Peter-Jürgen, his real name, from the wild class B, where he never really fitted in – for one thing because of what he was called. They dubbed him Triple Eye or simply: Triple. But then I made up for all the taunts by calling him Peter, and so it was that we ended up cycling along together, even if we both had no idea where to. ‘Anywhere will do’, said Peter, ‘Anywhere that isn’t home.’ There, you could have scissored the thick air into shreds. He often spoke about scissors and shreds, I think he wanted to tell me: ‘You are not alone.’ Which is how I know that it is possible to speak about things without spelling them out, and that sometimes this is the best way to talk, the best way to understand. Leave the unsayable unsaid, speak around it, or else just stay silent.
We were often silent, Peter and I, and the special thing about it was that our silence was not embarrassing. We were silent because that was our nature, just as sadness and boredom were, and also the vague feeling that the two had something to do with each other. In silence we would park our bicycles. Make and smoke a roll-up under the trees. Inhale deeply, exhale. And smile. We would pass the Parkhouse cafe and anxiously ask ourselves whether we would ever grow up to be like the students drinking cold beer in the shade, and whether that was what we even wanted: to grow up like that. We would take each other’s hand and hold on tight, never let go again, for a perfect moment, stolen away from time, press our mouths together and tongue a little forward, then quickly back again in alarm, falling apart with a moist sound. My first kiss. On the lawn where the punks hang out. Embarrassed, I pushed him away. And as I pushed him away, it happened. On one of the benches, the ones next to the fountain, on the bench where I myself had sat a few times and looked up at the sky, on that bench I made out the figure of my father. I turned pale, then red, Peter asked: ‘What’s up?’ I felt the blood draining from me, and flowing out towards Father. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ I said and shoved Peter to one side. Suddenly I was ashamed of having kissed him, before Father’s eyes, as it were, to have kissed a pimply little boy under his gaze, which was my home. I said something like ‘All right then, see you later!’, said it as casually as I could, as though we had nothing to do with one another, left Peter standing there, where he just stood, and I walked, sharp blades under the soles of my feet, over to the person who would, I knew, soon, right now, hold me in his arms, soon, right now, explain everything... I lost my balance and fell, hands forward, onto the tarmac. Father jumped up and grabbed my arm, the arm I had cut to pieces, squeezed it gently and asked: ‘Are you hurt?’ His gaze surrounded me, dark grey, and I knew: now he would recognise me. Now! And once more: Now! Still he looked straight through me and saw nothing but a girl who had tripped over, looked at me and then finally looked away, said something like ‘Well, all right then!’ as if we had nothing else to do with one another, left me lying there, where I just lay, and walked away. Dry-throated, I tried to shout: ‘Father!’ but my shout was a whisper, nothing more. Like in a dream when you open your mouth and nothing comes out. Not a sound. Not a word. Nothing at all.
*
I was sixteen years old. The spitting image of Mother. Whenever I looked in the mirror I could see my future: a steep downhill path leading through a ravine and into the abyss. Soon after our kiss, Peter had been in a bike accident. He had fallen into a coma, from which he never awoke. I often asked myself whether the air pumped down a tube into his lungs was thick or thin, and whether he actually felt lonely, in this air, or whether his loneliness comforted him, maybe. Gerhard and Rainer, who came after him, found these questions weird and disappeared again soon after the first argument, and after Frau Neugebauer, Gunther’s wife, my maths teacher’s wife, caught me and him together in their bedroom, then that was the end of that too. Which is how I know, that everything comes to an end. No matter what it is, it comes to an end.
When I didn’t get my period, Mother called me a slut. But that too came to an end. Gunther paid for the abortion and he paid me to keep quiet afterwards too. In the envelope that he had slipped me in the corridor between assembly hall and the staff room there was enough money to keep me quiet until the end of my life. It wasn’t hard. Like I said: silence was in my nature. After one-and-a-half weeks’ absence I caught up on my schoolwork quickly and whenever I bumped into Frau Neugebauer on Sporgasse or in Kastner’s department store I would say ‘Good morning’ and she would reply and it was as if nothing had ever happened. Although we didn’t go as far as shaking hands, that would have been too much. I noticed this from the tense way in which she pressed her arms to her sides: one touch, however banal, would have driven her over the edge, right then and there.
*
I was eighteen years old.
A student in Vienna.
I went to Graz twice a year. Once at Christmas, once for Mothers’ Day.
I was twenty-three.
On a scholarship in Berlin.
In Graz for Christmas, though not every Christmas.
Twenty-nine.
Ph.D. student in particle physics in Toronto, with the prospect of a research post in Houston.
Now and then I still spoke to Mother on the phone. Her voice sounded old. The noise on the line made it easy for us to hang up again after five minutes.
Thirty-one. Thirty-two.
Graz is a telegram that says: ‘Mother dead. Stop. Anita Drechsler’.
*
Frau Drechsler fetched me from the airport in a Mazda. She had, she said, recovered from the many blows that life had dealt her. ‘It’s just so very sad that your mother never managed. So sad that your father’s death—do you remember, it was just after your third birthday—threw her off course so badly. And you didn’t want to accept that he was dead, you clung to him, long after his death! So terrible for your mother, to see you like that! The sight of you was torment for her. I can say it all now, can’t I?’ Eyes burning into me. ‘The way you behaved was downright scary. Into the emptiness like that, with a man, invisible, I mean, really, don’t you think, it was like something out of a horror film.’ She gave a shrill laugh. ‘And now look, how you turned out! I’m telling you, if Maria were still around today, she would have been really happy for you. But that’s just the way it is, it’s as the Lord has ordained.’
With these words she dropped me off and I saw that she was crying. Her hands on the steering wheel, she cried silently to herself. Poor Frau Drechsler, I thought, she’s obviously gone mad from sheer grief.
And here I am again, in the house with the naked walls, looking for evidence that Father, the father in my mind, really did exist. I look for photos. For letters. All in vain. The only thing I find is the note, a yellowed Farewell. I slip it into my pocket and walk to the source. Twigs snap beneath my feet. The Andritzbach is a rushing stream; it swallows every word, eager to swallow them. When I get there I will throw the note into the green water and watch as the surface begins to quiver gently, very gently around its edges, as it gradually soaks up the water, and eventually sinks. And perhaps then I will see that it was Mother’s spidery script, the handwriting of a drunk, who wanted to release me, and then perhaps I will hear her laughter, a distant lament like the passing of time. ‘When I get there,’ I say. But even this sentence vanishes; it’s vanished. Which is how I know that Graz is also a city just like any other.
Translated from German by Kate Howlett-Jones
Kate Howlett-Jones was born in the UK in 1971. She graduated from Oxford University in 1993 with a Masters in French and Russian. She lives in Graz, Austria and works as a translator, cultural journalist and writer.
