Valerie Fritsch

The First Death I Saw from Inside

This place was always distant from everything. In winter, it was a dead land made of stone and cold, shrunk to that wizened bleakness and darkness in which only the street lamps glowed through snow and fog as if from underground, and in summer there was such a melancholic air about it as if it had never recovered from winter. The house and the stables were old, damp, rickety. The meadow was soft from mole holes and dog excrement so that you sank into the brown earth at even the slightest step. In the distance the bent backs of the mountains bore the gravestones and summit crosses like a burden. In the pastures there were upside down enamel bathtubs inside which hares slept and rotting apple trees which at some point buckled under their own weight. 

Outside, the nettles were as high as children. Inside, my grandmother sat as thin as a matchstick in the eternally overheated kitchen keeping the dog on a calving rope with one hand and in the other holding a stick which she used either to hit the dog or to scratch herself. It was a corner of the earth where break always won out over make, a place sensitive to vinegary smells and great terrors; it was a place where nothing was harmless.

 

I never saw my grandmother outside this house; it was as if her destiny terminated at the garden gate. The place was tailor-made for her; she wore it like a dress and later like an exoskeleton onto which her hard peasant’s skin had been grafted and which held her upright and kept her alive as long as she was inside it. She was convinced that as long as she never left the house and the farm she would never die, as if on her property death had no dominion. She could not countenance her own mortality; iron headed and stubborn, she raged against finiteness, was ready neither for farewells nor redemption, had no wish to be reconciled with herself or with others, distrusted every unfamiliar word, every consolation she was offered, every change that was not subject to her will.
She would stride across the garden like a soldier, patrolling the crooked fences, and at the end of a visit she would throw herself over the bonnet of the rolling car as we drove away through the open gate.
Although she was very old, she did not want to die, never ever wanted to die. Constantly in the grip of hunger, she would feed her bony body strange things. Evenings she could be found bending silently over the kitchen table, an old woman wearing dark clothes and rubber boots, endlessly chewing on the fat. She stuffed herself with food, drank a knob of melted butter out of a tin milk jug, spooned honey out of large glasses trapped in the folds of her skirt, cut the fat off the meat, gave the lean to the dogs and ate the rind herself. Once she had finished she would let her hands drop onto the wooden board and stare at the wall. 

She had knotty, twitching hands which gave the impression of being restless and greedy even when she prayed. Once when she fell over in the stable and wasn’t found until a day later, her fingers were so tightly knitted together that it was almost impossible to separate them, so desperately had she clung to life.

 

When I was a child, she lived what to me was the strangest life. 

My grandmother didn’t like me. I wasn’t even sure whether she liked people at all. She understood affection towards even the smallest child neither as a logical consequence of a blood relationship nor as a response to a child’s smile. Love as a reflex towards people was beyond her ken. Although on occasions she could be friendly, it was always a matter of indifference to her. This didn’t make me sad but each time surprised me anew. I used to observe her very carefully in order to make up for what I couldn’t understand. I saw that there was always some hidden malice contained in each of her utterances and then also loneliness; it was impossible to say whether it was intentional or whether she knew that she suffered as a result. I saw how her lips tapered into a line when she was silent. How her ears became deaf with every question. How her closed mouth always seemed to hold back a cry behind her teeth. After the initial greetings it was only a matter of minutes before all those present had to shout, first out of necessity, to make sure that they could hear each other and later out of confusion and anger. For hours on end I would watch these people shouting at one another with their mouths wide open, my grandmother stiffly enthroned on a garden chair, a kitchen armchair or a wooden bench, the others circling around her, the volume of the conversation going up and down in time with the sound of people’s steps, first walking away upset and then running back in one further attempt to come to some kind of understanding. My father paced to and fro like an animal in a cage. She called him lazy and ugly, nasty, said he never came to see her, that he was a cheapskate, who sent her too little money, a traitor, because he hadn’t stayed on the farm all those years ago but had gone hundreds of miles away from home to study and had married my mother. She called my aunt, her daughter, a fatso, who had grown fat from telling so many lies, because she lied every time she opened her big mouth. She never even looked at me. Once she had found out which Christmas biscuits her grandchildren liked best, she stopped baking that sort. I used to stand silently next to my parents’ trouser legs holding their hands and taking a good look at everything. I never said a word; sometimes, however, I would stand before my father to protect him. When I got older, I would sometimes shout along with the rest of them, and then when I got even older I fell silent again. Those visits. There was hate, reproaches and name-calling. That was the first time I heard my parents call anyone that I knew nasty. And I learnt that a bad person must keep dogs that secretly love them. 

 

At night my grandmother crept along the corridors of the house terrified of noises and ghosts. When she went to bed, she slept covered with numerous layers of blankets and the bitter sweat of sleep. On a bad night she shouted her head off in a dream-crazed frenzy, and after a good night she awoke with a touch of mildew around her mouth which she wiped away when she saw herself in the mirror first thing in the morning. 

While uncomfortable with people, she loved animals. In the morning grey she would wander into the garden in the first light and throw the hooded crows some milk-soaked bits of bread roll. With goose pimples and unkempt Medusa hair, she then stood surrounded by birds that flew towards her from the trees. The wind pressed her clothes tightly against her body and made her even thinner than she already was. Just like a conductor, she would raise and drop her arms, conducting the black birds that flew through the air like musical notes and then plopped back down on the branches. Then she used to open the stable doors and let the sheep and the horse out onto the pasture, sit down on a bench in front of the house, stroke the cat, look at the mice the cat had brought her and, if she thought they were too big, she would tear them apart in the middle to make them easier to eat. That was the first death I saw from inside.
I have never forgotten that moment. How she bent the small dead body over her fingers until the grey fur split open and the little bones snapped as if they were toothpicks. How she divided the body in two. How she held the head in one hand and the torso in the other. How her moustache hairs trembled. How the cat slowly bore away the mouse that had been torn asunder. A strange love-hate relationship connected her to the animal: every day she spent hours coddling it, but when the cat threatened to die one cold winter, she was so disappointed in the animal that she carried it to the dustbin outside the house and only days later, when it turned out the animal was not yet dead, did she take it back inside.

 

Although the place must have been frightening not only to a child but also to any other person, I liked being there. I liked the museum-like immobility and gigantomania of the house that made everybody appear small; the over-sized rooms, as if it suffered from gigantism; the cold of the walls that made you freeze when you touched them with your hands; the stuffed buzzards in the corners caught in an eternal swoop; and the oil painting with the blue grapes, so lifelike that birds that had accidentally got into the house through the window would start picking at them. 

Over the years it had decayed. On the first floor, wisteria grew through the walls and bloomed inside the room. Model planes hung from the ceiling on sewing thread and the grey warships that my grandfather had once made stood on the wardrobes gathering dust. One winter the pipes had frozen up and broken, and since then there had been no running water. My aunt started stealing water from the cemetery, filling it into canisters that she then carried along the rows of graves and past the funeral parties. The bereaved would be bent over in grief and she herself was bent over in shame, always with a prayer on her lips, praying that none of the singers from the church choir would recognize her. The house was so draughty it felt as if there were a wind blowing from the attic right down into the cellar. It was cold in summer and in winter, only in the kitchen did an unhealthily hot climate reign all year long, coming from the old wood-burning stove on which milk was boiled and left to stand until you could take the skin off. It had as many wrinkles as my grandmother’s face and tasted sweet and disgusting when my father took it out of the pot and held it in front of my mouth for me to bite it off. Outside was the garden, overflowing with dark plants and heavy smells. Inside it was like a cathedral, cool and dirty. On the floor in the hall grave candles burned, since they were cheaper than ordinary candles. If there was a family celebration, everybody got up again from the ready-laid table and secretly took the dirty plates and glasses into the bathroom to wash them in the wash-hand basin before the soup was served. Everybody mistrusted everything. Normality in the form of shared agreement didn’t exist; there was only the silence that takes the place of a cry and the high-pitched tones of the women, who hadn’t realized that their voices had long been too loud. My grandmother sat at the head of the table; she said very little but just twirled her fork around either in the food or in her dark-dyed chignon. The food was always the same: pancake soup, chicken and stewed peaches out of a tin. Even before the first plate was empty, somebody had called the Slovenes subhuman and demanded corporal punishment for fare-dodgers.
By dessert, everything was out of control and someone had wished death on someone else. On feast days it was all much bitterer. 

 

That this place had once been a home seemed to me unimaginable.
That children had existed in this world in which love neither had validity in itself nor could serve as directions for action was close to unbelievable. My father seldom spoke of his childhood. When he recounted the days of his youth, he would talk about the high grass in the meadows and the hay bales on the mown ground that stood around the flat land like sheep, fat and harvested. He talked about going swimming after school when children used to throw each other into the water and about having to go home with a whole river in his heavy damp clothes, carrying it like a shadow along the dusty summer roads. He explained to me how as a young altar boy he had traded rusty hand grenades for apples and jam jars in the corners of the nave. He railed against Catholicism, which rang through the village, both a colossal song and a colossal sorrow.
He spoke of house-high snowdrifts and tomatoes as small as marbles.
He talked about boys’ pranks, slaughterhouses and the sugar cigarettes his mother’s lover used to slip him secretly. He spoke of foxes, rabbits and horses, farmyard cats and the dog which, even when he was studying far away, would sit at the garden gate waiting for him hours before he came home unannounced. Then one day it ran out on to the road and was run over. Even after so many years, tears would come to my father’s eyes when he recalled the animal and he would turn away pretending he had to sneeze. As a child, in desperation, I gave him my soft toy dog, and even after I was long grown up I never again dared offer him any consolation. He gave little away, never mentioning my grandmother in more than a subordinate clause.
He spoke of the land and the animals but said nothing about the people. He was a fugitive, an exile, without a father but not without a homeland. His origins were inside every bone in his body. There was even a strange smell that clung to his body for days on end after he had visited his parents’ house. How often did he have to shower to cleanse himself
of his origins. And yet, like a migrating bird, he always returned. It was as if the place had imprinted a birthmark on him. He couldn’t rid himself of it and however far away he went, he always came back. However nasty my grandmother’s comments on our presence, each visit was followed by another, each wound by a deeper wound. Hope misfired time after time. 

 

During her last years, we only ever went to see her very rarely.
Although she was no longer afraid of anything, she looked like death.
The kitchen had become her burial chamber. Her fleshless figure sat at the wooden table next to the stove, ready to endure perdition.
She was a ghoul, a thin being with a basilisk eye. Behind the drawn curtains, she was surrounded by darkness and it was difficult to say whether she had given birth to that darkness or whether she had been dissolved in it and had already dozed over into another world. Her long hair, its ends still dyed black, its roots snow white, fell onto her bald forehead. It gave off a pungent smell. Puddles of urine shimmered in the corners because no one let the dog out. Mice ran all around her over the sideboard, and the dog, bound to the wheelchair by a calving rope, turned away from them. A single pearl earring hung from her ear.
In the drooping lap of her skirt lay breadcrumbs and a dry bread roll which she scraped with her fingernails. Sometimes she sighed, took a pork sausage out of her boots and fed the dog some hard, already transparent slices of sausage. Every few minutes she gave the animal something to eat as if she needed to assure herself of its love. Then she stared back inside herself and the dog stared longingly out of the window.
She could hardly walk any more; we had carried her bed from the first to the ground floor. We bent down to her and each of us made an effort to say some conciliatory words. My father had become so speechless over the years that my mother would give him prompts about what to say to the old woman. I was afraid that at the last moment we were confusing love and pity. We tried to bid her farewell and to decrypt her final rejoinder from her silence. She spoke not a word, but when the priest came and told her that God would soon come to take her home to Him, she said angrily that she wasn’t interested in heaven as she already had a home. With nobody’s blessing.