Prehistory

[DieterM]

1

I’m not sure I wanted to be born. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no suicide candidate. I cherish life. Mine, far from turning out a long and calm river, has taken me up and down. But I’ve always considered a waste of time and energy to deplore things I can’t change. I’m used to ups and downs now.

Deep inside, though, I keep thinking that my previous state must have been delightful. Those nine months when I was kind of floating in my mother’s womb, starting as a single cell that divided into two, then four, then eight, then more, eventually growing into something ever more complex, more complicated.

Maybe the whole problem started with that cell division thing? Maybe I was happiest when I existed as a simple one-cell organism? It just figures, right? Since that didn’t last long. Happy times never do.

My point is that after a short period of pure bliss, bad things started to happen. They started the moment I was born. We’re talking about the pre-epidural years, here; therefore the first things I heard were my mother’s piercing screams and the midwife barking, “Push! Chrissake, woman, push!”

Of course, my memories don’t reach back that far. I only know these things from hearsay, and hearsay lacks the ring of truth that memories, even false ones, have. Yet as far as my pre-birth period is concerned, I can’t be wrong. My mother’s such a warm-hearted, emotional and nurturing woman that I’m certain I was fine in her womb. Fine and happy.

The repercussions of that early, let’s say pre-historical happiness still show through in my character. First of all, I’m an optimist. Go beat me. Secondly, I like to live in my bubble. I guess you can call me a procrastinator.

I’ve got this theory. About procrastinators.

They come in three forms, okay? Let’s begin with the lazybones. People who dodge anything that might resemble work, even remotely. Their astute assumption is that most things, when left until later, tend to be done by others.

Type #2 are the conflict-haters. They make every effort to avoid confrontations, dithering over decisions and actions until someone else decides or acts in their place. Those guys need to be thick-skinned because others will badmouth them as cowards or people pleasers. I should know; I’m one of them. A bit. Or a lot. Depends on who you ask.

That doesn’t imply those guys are losers. If they manage to ignore all the badmouthing, they can still get into politics and become natural success stories. Pity I was never tempted by that path.

Now, type #3. This is important, okay? The idealists. Caught in the reflections of their bubble and allergic to the many vicissitudes reality casts their way. They live like ostriches, their heads buried deep in the sand. Theirs is a world of imagination and dreams. Don’t ask them to deal with situations that require a quick response. Open-eyed and numb, they’ll stare at problems like rabbits surprised by a cobra.

But unlike the two other types, if the going gets so tough that their bubble bursts for good, they’re able to shake off the shards. And do something.

Not always the right thing.

But still.

And that’s me. Cornelius in a nutshell.

But wasn’t I talking about my birth? Sorry, I’m a fuss-head.

So. I was born. But I would never have been conceived if there hadn’t been that letter. Yes, I’m that old. Born in an era where people still wrote letters.

To be precise, it’s not the whole letter. It’s one sentence. That triggered it all off, I mean. My parents meeting, falling in love, marrying, engaging in regular fiddly-diddling, until—ta-da!—the afore-mentioned single cell that was to become fabulous me appeared in my mother’s uterus.

[DieterM]

2

I’ve grown up in a little village in the mountains. My mother has not. She was born in the southernmost, flattest part of Styria. You can check on Google Maps—see that appendix that bores into Slovenia like a probing finger? Near the tip of that finger, bordered by the river Mur and a rivulet called Kutschenitza, you find Murnitz, the small hamlet my mother comes from. If you zoom, that is.

Keywords such as agriculture, Catholic devoutness, conservatism, and exaggerated Germanic pride define this region. The first three always go together in Austria, even today. As for the last one, it’s historical.

Let me explain. When the Habsburg Empire still existed, the local gentry that was administrating the duchy of Styria spoke German. Whereas the common folk—peasants, craftsmen, workers—would communicate in Slovenian.

Little by little, though, people wanted to imitate the upper class. Pathetic yet human. They started to look down on those speaking Slovenian in public, even scorn them. What with the growing nationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries, you had to choose your side. Now, a clean family name like Müller, Maier, Drechsler was easy proof of genuine Germanic origins. But if your last name was Stepanovic, for instance, you were hard-pressed to pretend the same. And the less Germanic you were, the more Germanic you’d try to act.

In the plains of the South where my grandparents lived, people cultivated wheat, corn, vegetables, and fruits. Pumpkins, cucumbers, potatoes. Apples, walnuts, plums. I remember vast and wild forests, too. I remember beech trees, chestnut trees, oak trees, ash trees, linden-trees, birch trees, rowans, maples, hornbeams, and weeping willows. I remember high grass with daffodils in springtime.

A few kilometres to the North began the softly undulating hill country, covered with vineyards. Another strong memory of mine: our family autumn strolls up there. The sun, ready to set early, shed gentle light on the landscapes, oblique rays wiping out any neat contour and blurring everything in warm colours. The grapevines’ regular patterns followed gentle slopes and dingles like as many meticulously combed strands of hair. Vine leaves and forests were aflame with yellow and red and brown hues, only a few recalcitrant trees braving the season, their foliage still green, but it was a dark green, an almost nostalgic green. When I narrowed my eyes, I could guess the reaped fields in the distance, all ochre and brown. The traditional farms, low buildings with small windows and thick, calcimined walls, pressed against the ground as if the weight and immensity of the sky had flattened them.

So, that’s where my mother grew up. In a house built at the edge of a forest, down in the plains, a mere five-minutes’ walk from the Kutschenitza and Yugoslavia, as the country was called back then.

Mother’s mother Cilli with the tell-tale maiden name Stepanovic was working for the local notable, the Count Stürgkh. My grandfather Hans Drechsler was a carpenter. Cilli and Hans had married after the war; my mother was their only child.

How odd. My mind hasn’t kept a clear picture of these guys. My mother’s parents, I mean.

I remember their physical features, but the rest is harder to define. Oh, I remember grandma Cilli as a warm and generous woman. But that’s about all. She died from cancer when I was a little kid.

And grandpa Hans would always remain a faraway person. You know, someone you could describe as discreet because he’d always stay outside, at the edge, sleek and elusive like a fish you’d try to catch with your bare hands. Especially after Cilli’s death, he would disappear from the family circle in small, maybe involuntary steps, but with determined steadfastness.

Of course he would show up for the usual family reunions such as Christmas, because my mother insisted each time. Of course I would see him during my holidays, when the family spent several weeks in his house at the edge of the forest. Of course he would tell me countless stories of the war, when he’d enrolled in the Wehrmacht. He’d been to Norway, he’d suffered from diarrhoea in Greece. But the man always acted as if his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandchildren were mere strangers whose existence he accepted, but whose departure he never regretted.

To me, Cilli and Hans feel like a man and a woman who have stepped out of a dense wall of fog, two hard-working persons in their middle ages whose only purpose was to welcome me at my birth, offer me a regular change of environment during my childhood and teenage years, and disappear at last without too great an impact on my own existence.

I guess that’s what my mother feels, too. She hardly ever mentions them. The memories we share concern the parcels grandma Cilli sent us. They contained home-grown vegetables and fruits and stuff. And the banknotes grandpa Hans would slip into three plain, white envelopes at Christmas. One for my mother, one for my sister, one for me. Nothing for my father; Hans liked him, but never considered him family.

By the way, and just for the record: grandpa Hans would always ask my mother to get him the three envelopes. Five minutes before we’d distribute the Christmas presents.

[Hawkman]

Interesting! Keep it coming, Dieter...

[DieterM]

Thanks, Hackman. I will, I will… it's a rather lengthy text, so if you want to bear with me, I'd be very happy :-) The whole thing might or might not be the first chapter of a novel. I don't know yet.

[DieterM]

3

My father was born in the Northern part of Styria, in Kleindorf. Imagine a typical village in the middle of the Alps: a municipality consisting of several hamlets and a main village with a small central square where the Town Hall stands. Kleindorf has three schools. Its plain, white church dates back to the 9th century, the building itself being a mash-up of Romanic, Gothic, Baroque and Neo-Gothic styles.

There’s a supermarket. Next to it, a cemetery. This odd vicinity has nothing to do with cause and effect, of course.

Along the two main roads stand low buildings, no higher than three storeys, some of which house doctor’s offices, cafés, restaurants, and different trades: bakeries, grocery stores, hairdressers, watchmakers, pharmacies. There’s a Chinese restaurant.

In one word, it looks like the average Austrian village.

Situated at the edge of a large basin, Kleindorf huddles against a gentle, woody rise. When you take the road next to the church, you discover a brook that runs down the slope, cutting a winding rift into the forest. The rivulet murmurs and gurgles peacefully in summer and autumn, its banks overgrown with fern and flowers, grass and clover, stinging nettles and alpine plants. Here and there, the trees' overhanging branches hide it from view.

In winter, a tiny trickle is barely audible, the brook syrupy under its thick crust of ice. In springtime, when its demons awake with the melting of the snow, it gets all puffed up, rushing and gushing and roaring down the rift as if to show how important it is.

Following the rivulet upstream, you pass near the stony, moss-covered remnants of an ancient castle, long ago the stronghold of proud and cruel knights who used to rob the merchants of the county on their way to the nearest market fair. The prince-archbishop of Salzburg, owner of the castle, finally tired of the constant complaints and had the castle razed. Time and weather did the rest, until only shatters and ruins remained.

If you walk on, let’s say for half an hour, up and up and up, you leave the shadows of the forest behind and reach a rustic alpine farm made of thick stones and dark, old wood, surrounded by steep meadows and ancient, whispering trees. The flowers give off a wild, dry perfume; bees, flies, and bumblebees hum around.

The fertile basin stretches at your feet now, imposing mountain ranges surrounding it like rocky sentinels. The houses and streets of the village down below look tiny as if toys. The giant slate pile of an ancient coalmine rises in the middle of cornfields. Not too far away, there’s a moated Renaissance castle.

Now, my family… Well, my father’s father, Ferdinand “Ferdi” Dohr, a good-humoured and tolerant fellow, was working in the local coalmine. My grandma Berta was living three kilometres from Kleindorf on a farm where she had been hired as a milkmaid when she was fourteen.

I don’t know much about how she met grandpa Ferdinand. Her employer must have brought her “to town” on Sundays to go to Mass. That could have favoured an accidental first encounter. Alas, not with Ferdi, though; Lord Jesus no! Not only was he working class, but a Communist into the bargain. One of those dreamers who believed in a better tomorrow, in the inevitable downfall of capitalism, and the rise of a new race of humans. In his world, religion was but the opiate of the masses.

I call him a dreamer because he never was dogmatic. An idealist, not an ideologist. Things always start to go downhill when a vague dream, however beautiful, becomes an ideology. When hope becomes blind faith.

Now, apart from the church, where could he have met grandma Berta? Maybe he stumbled upon her on the farm where she was working? It’s true that Ferdi was popular with the local farmers. Which comes as a surprise—most of them were conservative and fervent Catholics, whose only fear, besides Hell, was what they called the Red Danger, the henchmen of Moscow.

But grandpa was an easy-going lad. With a healthy thirst. And it wasn’t water he preferred, if you catch my drift. Now, what bridges ideological gaps better than some pints and a few glasses of schnapps?

Moreover, Ferdi was always ready to help. “Certainly, certainly…”, he'd say when someone asked for a service. One of his brothers, for instance, was living on another farm. Ferdi would visit him once a week, bringing a small leather satchel with scissors and a mechanical beard trimmer. They’d take turns cutting each other’s hair. Grandpa was good at that. In a small village, word-to-mouth information spreads fast, so he’d tour the farms and cut the peasants’ hair in his spare-time, too.

My grandparents married in 1925, in the month of January. The wedding took place in the plain, white village church. I’m sure grandpa Ferdi had a pint or two. And the odd glass of schnapps. To wash down his Communist pride, to forget that entering the church, even for his own wedding, would be some kind of treason.

It was a cold, cold winter’s day. The country was hidden under a thick, harsh crust of snow. Fat, grey clouds covered the sky. At noon, a blizzard broke out and made the last, vague silhouettes disappear behind a curtain of snowflakes. When grandma Berta looked out of a window, she saw a last, hardy raven cross the farmyard, looking for shelter. The wind was howling, the wood in the stove was cracking.

Berta had a frugal lunch with the farmer’s family. A piece of rancid bread. A cup of substitute coffee because it was a special day. She cleaned up the kitchen. Then she took her best dress from the drawer. She put on her new shoes—she had saved up quite a sum to buy them. She wrapped a shawl around her skinny shoulders. A scarf over her head. She put on her shabby green winter coat. As she didn’t own gloves, she dug her hands deep in the pockets of her coat.

Ferdi didn’t come to pick her up. He didn’t propose, he wouldn't even have thought he should. In his world, there was no place for sentimentalism.

Therefore, Berta walked to Kleindorf all alone, in her new shoes, which were too thin for winter. Three kilometres in a blizzard. She scarcely saw the trail leading from the farm to the road or the road itself. She made her way by intuition, rifting through the snowstorm. After a few minutes she didn't feel her fingers anymore. She didn't feel her feet anymore.

[DieterM]

4

Things went smoothly for the two of them. Grandma Berta managed to convince Ferdinand not to get involved in the Civil War that broke out in 1934, opposing left and right wing partisans. He kept a low profile under the new fascist regime that followed, too. A first son was born, then two daughters.

In 1938, Germany finally invaded and annexed Austria. The persecutions started. Even in the smallest jerkwater towns.

The new, icy wind came blowing through our calm, little Kleindorf, too. One day, in the still of the grey morning hours, men in black uniforms arrived in dark cars. Hamlet after hamlet, block after block, street after street, they knocked on certain doors. Dogs would bark, one could hear harsh orders, women crying and begging.

An hour later, two lines of men and boys, in fact all the local Communists and Socialists, young and old, were led toward the central square with their hands held up high above their heads. A cemetery silence fell over the village, only disturbed by the occasional sigh, the odd swish of a curtain someone was drawing aside to watch the macabre parade.

The men in black distributed shovels and made their captives dig a deep ditch. When the work was done, the highest-ranking Nazi officer barked, “Position yourselves along the ditch! Turn around!”

The captives complied.

The Nazis took target. Their sten guns crackled. And more than two dozen men tumbled into the ditch.

Kleindorf stank of gunpowder and death.

Grandpa Ferdi wasn’t among the killed. How he escaped is a mystery to me. I don’t know, either, how he managed to survive until the end of the war. Did he climb the slope behind the village, hide in the forest, and wait out the war? Or did he find shelter on one of the farms?

I’m grateful he survived, in any case. And so should you. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here to tell you my story. Because my father, the last of Ferdis’ and Berta’s five children, was born in 1944.

And father was so close to getting killed before he could celebrate his second birthday, too! The Allied forces were bombing the region, trying to destroy the coalmine, the Nazi steel plants, and the military airport that had been built in the middle of the basin—anything to end the war.

That day, grandma Berta had sent my oldest aunt Lucia to one of the farms nearby to get some eggs and milk. And Lucia had taken my father with her.

She was walking back home, following the dusty country road, whistling a song to her baby brother, when the sirens were sounded in the distance, announcing an impending air raid.

The merry tune died on Lucia’s lips. She clasped the child more tightly and looked up.

The sky was empty, a big blue ocean of spring. Then Lucia discovered the tiny spots appearing from behind the Eastern summits, an entire squadron of silvery hornets moving toward her. She gulped and sped up, fast and faster, until she almost ran. She had to find shelter, and quickly, too.

But the first airplanes were upon her, sparkling like beautiful angels of death, before she could reach the nearest farm. The engines roared above her head, she could hear the first explosions in the distance, their deep and terrifying Boom!-Boom!-Boom! drawing closer and closer.

At last, weeping and in panic, she jumped into a trench, protecting the screaming child with her body. She was trembling with fear, praying that the high grass would hide them from danger.

Luckily, the Allied pilots had more important targets to destroy than a teenage girl and a baby.

When the war was over, Ferdi worked and raised his five kids. But his imprint on my life remains fuzzy. Unless you count his legacy in terms of precocious baldness and constant thirst. Thanks to him, I’m no teetotaller, quite the contrary.

What remains of him are a few black-and-white photos. In one of them, he’s pushing my sister’s baby stroller: bald and paunchy Ferdinand Dohr, big smile and proud look on his face.

There are memory fragments, too. My granddad smoking his pipe. My granddad coming home dead drunk one day. It was a Sunday, shortly before noon. He had **** in his trousers, that drunk he was. Grandma Berta threw a fit, as who wouldn’t.

“Even an ox is brighter than you!” she yelled while yanking his soiled trousers off his legs. “An ox stops drinking when it ain’t thirsty anymore!”

[DieterM]

5

Oh. Yes. Wow! The letter. I prattle and blat, and the letter-story seems to be nowhere in sight. Sorry. But I warned you: I’m a procrastinator. And a dreamer. We dreamers always focus on dispensable details. We rarely do essentials.

Anyway, even dispensable details teach us a lesson. In probability, for instance. I mean, what were the odds for me to be born? On my mother’s side, grandma Cilli could’ve been living in Slovenia instead of Austria, right? And grandpa Hans could’ve been killed during the war like the millions that were.

On my father’s side, things look just as haphazard. There was only a little chance for grandma Berta and grandpa Ferdinand to meet. Yet they did. Ferdi the Communist could’ve been shot by the Nazis like his comrades. My father could’ve been killed by an Allied bomb.

But all those guys met and survived, against all odds. My grandparents had kids. My mother on one side, my father, amongst others, on the other.

And what were the odds of my parents meeting? Mother and father were living more than a hundred kilometres apart, after all. Back in the 50s and 60s, considering both their upbringing and social origins, what would’ve been the expected turn of events for them? They could’ve stayed within a ten-kilometre-reach of where they were born. That’s what people did back then. They could’ve married someone in their vicinity. They would’ve had kids. But different kids. Not me.

So you would be reading a different story right now.

Or no story at all.

See? That’s a dreamer’s material. Would’aves and could’aves.

And don’t tell me it was predestination. I don’t believe in that. I prefer to believe in odds. The odder the odds, the better the result. Just look at me.

Right. Back to our letter.

At sixteen, my mother left her parents’ home to start an apprenticeship as a sales assistant. Her training took place in a small town some kilometres north of Murnitz.

Times were serious and grim for a youngster, back then. You didn’t have much of a ball. It wasn’t all about the latest jeans-fashion, or spending hours on a mobile talking and texting, or sulking in one’s bedroom because the parents wouldn’t allow you to spend the night at your best friend’s.

My mother attended a vocational school every second week. And worked in a grocery store the rest of the time. She lived with six other girls at their employer’s, in a cold, sparsely furnished room. Food was scarce, too, because the owner of the grocery store was a no-nonsense skinflint. He treated his apprentices like slaves.

Sometimes, my mother would do the inventory with her boss. He would sit on a chair, reading items off a list, and she would haste from one corner to the other to check the stocks. Apart from the boss’s mumbled words, the storeroom was silent. Once, my mother’s stomach started to rumble. She tried to still the noise, ashamed, but secretly hoping that her boss might notice, too. He might conclude that she was hungry. Maybe he’d finally get it that the portions he served were too small.

But he continued as if nothing had happened.

My mother’s best friend was called Karin. They’d help each other backcomb their hairdos, they’d starch their petticoats together, they’d smoke the odd cigarette, hidden behind a chestnut tree. The sixties were roaring somewhere else; in London, maybe, or in New York. Not in that little town. And yet, in their shy and nice ways, the two girls enjoyed their last teenage years. They worked hard, they learned their lessons, they snickered and covered their mouths when a handsome young man entered the grocery store, they regained their composure after their boss’s wife had shot them a murderous glance.

Finally, Karin finished her apprenticeship and found a job in a grocery store situated in my village. Without hesitating a second, she moved to Kleindorf. The store where she was working was a stone’s throw from where my grandparents were living. Just across the street, in fact.

It’s in that grocery store that Karin saw my father for the first time.

And that’s when she wrote the letter to my mother. My father wasn’t the main subject; Karin was just babbling on about her situation, the region, the regular customers. It was nothing but a harmless letter a young woman would write to her best friend.

“There’s this young guy,” Karin wrote. “Quite a looker, lemme tell you! Black hair, mischievous smile, coal black eyes. A pity, though—he’s got a glass eye!”

Now, luck would have it that the owners of that grocery store were looking for a second sales assistant. Karin innocently suggested my mother, “She’s excellent. She’ll do the job, I promise. And she’s about to finish her apprenticeship!”

So my mother received a second letter with a job proposal. For a moment, she was undecided. The place was so far away from home! Would she be able to like her new environment? Would she be able to leave behind everything she knew? Her parents, her little rivulet, the farmers, the softly rolling hills?

Finally, she made up her mind. A job was a job, and hell!, she wouldn’t spend her life fretting over things she had no answer for. She accepted, packed her few belongings, informed her parents, and moved to the village.

That happened in—wait. 1967? 1968?

The rest was simple. One day, my father entered the grocery store and approached the counter. Karin nudged my mother, whispering, “That’s the one! You know—the guy with the glass eye!” Then, she disappeared in the back shop to have a look at the stocks.

My mother served the young man and couldn’t help but notice that oh yes!, the young fellow was just as good-looking as Karin had told her. Mischievous smile that discovered cute little dimples; curious and sparkling coal black eyes; full, dark hair. He seemed a tad small for a lad, but lean and—she shivered with the thought—beefy, yes, outright beefy! When they proceeded to the cashier’s desk, she enjoyed the sight of his tight little bum and his muscular calves.

While cashing in the money, she continued to check him out. Discreetly, of course; she didn’t want to be taken for an easy lay. Still, that glass-eye-thing intrigued her. To her amazement, she couldn’t detect even a trace of this peculiar item. Had science progressed so much that glass-eyes had become invisible? How then had Karin been able to spot it? she asked herself.

My father noticed that the unknown young woman was ogling him with interest. You have to know that, when my mother discreetly checks out someone, she stops short of staring open-mouthed at the person. So father moved closer, her sweet smell enveloping him. Definitely—this young lass looked as if she was searching some kind of answer in his face!

My father realized that he liked what he saw, too: a soft, young woman with a bob cut, generous curves, and a romantic longing in her eyes. Damn yes, he liked it a lot.

And—bzing! The two weren't aware that good old Cupid was preparing to take aim and shoot one of his arrows. But shoot he did. And Cupid being Cupid, he hit two hearts spot-on.

[AuntShecky]

The first part speculating on your life in utero is compelling. Quite imaginative. I see some echoes of Tristram Shandy in there.

As for the subsequent parts -- your "prehistory" as you call it --somehow I know that you're grateful and consider yourself fortunate to have knowledge of your grandparents and parents. With yours fooly, alas, it's just the opposite. My siblings and I know virtually knowing about our family background. Once in a great while we would hear a childhood anecdote, but this was extremely rare. They seldom if ever talked about their own parents, both sets of whom having been long deceased before any of us were born.

My parents were second generation Americans whose respective parents came from two distinctly different parts of Europe. It must have been a desire for complete assimilation then that the result is we were pretty much left in the dark re: our family background. I guess it's an American thing.

[DieterM]

Aw, auntie, no info at all about your ancestors? Maybe it really is an American thing, I wouldn't know (never been to the US, would you believe it? But planning to come. One day). It's a pity though. You don't even know from which art of Europe they've come (no need to tell me the details, even if I'm known to be exceedingly curious about other people)?
As for the story in this thread, it is inspired by my family history, alright. But I don't know hardly anything; I was told many details, and one of my uncles did some genealogical research. But back then I was a kid and, of course, couldn't be bothered to listen. Most of the little stories in this thread come from anecdotes you could re-tell in a single sentence each. What I did was to embroider them, make them live. So you see, most of it (especially the details) is completely made up. For instance mid-wives ain't no boozers in Austria, lemme reassure you ;-)

[DieterM]

6

Mother and father became a regular item. After some mutual probing and testing, father proposed, and mother accepted. Back then that’s what you did when you were a young couple in love. They married in July 1970.

For their honeymoon, my father bought his first car, a light blue VW Beetle. He took my mother to the Tyrol. The photos of their trip show a happy young couple: a black-haired, handsome, manly guy in grey knickerbockers and a blue shirt dashing his bright smile at the radiant girl at his side; she is wearing huge Diva-sunglasses, knickerbockers and a matching shirt; the majestic, snow-covered mountain range shivers in the background. You can almost smell the freshness, the crispness of the air, the couple’s bliss drawing like a white halo around them.

The photo underlines that my parents couldn’t take their eyes off each other.

Nor their hands, it would seem.

As a result, my sister was born nine months later: a beautiful, healthy girl with a shock of black hair. She was immediately screaming her anger of landing in this world.

Mother wanted to call her Doris; father preferred Kerstin. Finally, grandma Berta proposed Klara. She had always been fond of that first name. My parents shuddered and formed an immediate coalition.

A week later, my sister was christened Kathi in the plain, white church of Kleindorf.

The months after Kathi’s birth were no easy ones for my mother. As my father was working alongside Ferdinand in the coalmine, he didn’t earn buckets of money. Thus, it was decided that my parents would live with Berta and Ferdi for a while. Mother and father occupied a small, unheated room, hardly big enough for a double bed and a small cupboard. My mother had to share Berta’s kitchen, Berta’s stove.

That was no undiluted pleasure because grandma could be peculiar. Small and frail like a sparrow, she was a stern, proud woman who didn’t easily show whether she appreciated someone or not. She accepted her daughter-in-law in the manner in which she had always accepted the twists and turns of her life: with an unmoved, stoical face. She appreciated my sister’s birth in her own, inimitable, wry style, too. “Neat,” she said, nodding in my mother’s direction. “She’s good at girls. That’s better than nothing.”

My father was Berta’s youngest and favourite child; as a result, my mother’s arrival in the family provoked some kind of passive-aggressive resistance. This female… newcomer wouldn’t encroach on Berta’s territory or upset her ways of doing things—no way! Therefore grandma continued to cook the meals for her husband and her son, leaving a small corner on the stove for my mother, who would prepare her own food and warm the milk for her baby.

Thus, some months passed by, my mother swallowing her pride and bearing with Berta, getting some discreet help from Ferdinand once in a while. He wouldn’t take sides in the mute war raging between his wife and his daughter-in-law. But whenever my mother needed something, he’d mumble, “Certainly, certainly.” Which counted as a non-negotiable decision.

In the still of their chilly bedroom, my parents continued to fiddly-diddle. Comfort fiddly-diddling—didn’t cost much, eased tensions.

And surprise! My sister was only six months old when my mother became pregnant again.

The day she found out, she was immediately reminded of her uncomfortable situation. She hadn’t planned to raise a second kid in grandma Berta’s shadow. Anger, frustration and helplessness welled up in her, with no one around on whom she could let it out.

Huh! When my father came home from work that evening, expecting a peaceful moment with his beloved wife and his daughter, my mother had transformed into a pressure cooker in high steam. Oblivious as usual, he stroked her cheek and said, “You look a bit tense, darling.”

“Tense?” my mother screamed. “Tense? I’m not tense, Mister Don’t-worry-I’ll-be-careful! I’m outright bloody livid!”

My mother using the b-word—that should have warned my father. Yet he thought he could placate her with a kiss.

That was the only time he came within a whisker of being slapped by my mother. But remembering her dignity, she straightened her spine. And broke the news without further ado. Adding that this was the bloody straw that broke the bloody camel’s back. To crown her speech, she threatened my father that she’d bloody never bloody uncross her bloody legs again. Ever.

Unfazed, Father said, “Hush, hush, darling! What if we tried to find a flat of our own?”

Oh, he knew what my mother wanted to hear! Open-mouthed, she stared at him, dried her eyes—six “bloodys” in a row had made them quite teary—, forced a feeble smile, and asked, “Can we afford it?”

“There’s always a solution,” my father answered. Then, he drew her into a tight hug and murmured into her ear, “I love you darling. And we’ll love that new baby, too!”

That’s when my sister started to scream. She was hungry. Or jealous in advance.

I was born in July 1972 in the maternity ward of the nearest hospital, in a town called Knittelfeld. The first environment I discovered must have consisted of clinical whites and shiny steel, the small town, the meadows and peaks and forests of the Alps shimmering outside the hospital windows in idle summer colours.

To my utter disappointment, no fairy was stooping over my cradle whispering promises of a lucky fate. Only the round face of a midwife in her forties, gleaming cheeks and red nose testifying to the woman’s healthy penchant for high percentage liquors. We locked eyes, both flushed, one smiling, the other one frowning.

The frowning one was I.

I was scandalized, sensing that this was just the beginning. Life would be a long series of disappointments, things would go downward from now on. I decided that a neat and piercing scream would best express my disarray, not knowing that my sister Kathi had already come to the same conclusion some months before.

That’s how I left a state of perfect, primitive and original happiness and entered life.

[DieterM]

7

My mother’s reaction when the midwife presented me, clean and peaceful after my first outburst of anger: she was too shocked for words.

That is, she seemed tired but joyful enough. Until the midwife trilled, “Yes, ma’am—it’s a boy!”, parting the white cloth in which she had wrapped me, discovering my baby willy and red balls. She expected enthusiasm, maybe a bout of misplaced pride.

Instead of that, my mother started to sob.

The midwife, fearing a precocious outbreak of Baby Blues, thought it best to lay me on my mother’s lap, tiptoe away while she still could and find comfort in the hip flask filled with schnapps she had stored away in the staff room.

But my mother doesn’t do Baby Blues. She’s more into the Anything-can-be-a-problem-Blues. Some say it’s because she’s a Virgo, always worried and angsty. Others believe it’s because she finds life too easy-peasy and has to invent problems in order to feel alive. Anyway, she grabbed the midwife by the sleeve and whined, “What have I done to deserve this?”

“What’s the matter, ma’am? Aren’t you happy?” the midwife asked.

“Oh… yes, I am. Very much,” my mother lied, looking more miserable by the minute. “Really… happy’s the word, yes.”

“You don’t look happy to me!” The midwife lifted me up again and held me tight, fearing that she was talking to a madwoman who might take the baby and smash it against the wall.

My mother’s voice became tiny, tears still streaming down her cheeks. “Well, it’s a boy! I know how to deal with a girl, wash her, powder her, you know. But how shall I deal with… that?” She made a lame gesture toward my baby privates, still in full sight. “It looks so… fragile. What if I do anything wrong?”

“Oh!” The midwife sighed with relief, hiding tiny noddle and eggs from view at last. “That. Don’t you worry, ma’am. We’ll show you. It’s… well, different, yes. But not very complicated. You will learn in no time. Now, do you want to hold your son for a second?”

My mother looked only half-persuaded. But her hormones kicked in at last. Or her maternal instinct. Or simply her sense of duty. “Yes,” she said. “Give me my son.”

The midwife complied, her face expressing ‘All’s well that ends well, and I can go have me a quencher at last’.

My mother pressed her nose to my neck and inhaled my sweet-sour baby smell. Then she kissed me on the forehead and whispered, “I love you, my little son!” And she did mean it.

[DieterM]

8

The next problem arose when my father came to discover his son. After a first explosion of joy, he fetched a chair and took me in his arms the way one picks up a piece of precious china. “How are we going to call him, darling?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” my mother replied, her tone meaning ‘I don’t care right now’. She had just delivered a baby, after all; she felt too weary to take a decision.

“Shall I ask Mom?” my cunning father asked.

This stirred the reaction he had hoped for. My mother sat up in bed, her eyes sparkling with determination. “Over. My. Dead. Body!” she hissed and held out her arms to reclaim me.

Amused, my father handed me back. “We could call him Johann, after your dad,” he proposed.

“Everyone will call him Hans. Or Hansi,” my mother said. “I don’t want people to use one of those hideous nicknames.”

“Ferdinand, after Dad?”

“People will call him Ferdi. Or Ferdl.”

“Georg?”

“Schursch.”

“Josef? Christian? Sebastian?”

“Sepp, Chris, Wastl.” My mother shuddered. “Why not choose something special?”

“Alright. My son will become someone special anyway,” my father replied. “He will do the things I couldn’t: go to university, have a fine career.”

Both pondered the question for a moment. Until my mother came up with a name. A special name. None they had ever used before. No one they knew had that name, either. “If we called him… Cornelius?” she suggested.

“Hm… Cornelius Dohr. Sounds good. Okay. Let’s call him Cornelius,” my father said. Sealing my fate without knowing it.

[DieterM]

9

“Remember me for what I was, not what I couldn’t be…” That’s a line from a song Anne Clark sang on her album “Hopeless Cases”, released in 1987. The music builds ornamental spirals around her expressive voice. Which sounds like a suitable background to this.

It’s a snapshot. Taken right after my christening in 1972, in front of the plain, white church of Kleindorf. It shows what I was.

What I couldn’t be, what I cannot be is manifold. But what I was is unique.

You can see the whole family on the photo. To be honest, a stranger could mistake their solemn faces for grim glares and conclude they have assembled for a funeral. Or a vendetta. Sure enough, they look like a Sicilian Clan straight out of “The Godfather”.

Pretty spot-on, in some ways. My family sometimes behaves like a Sicilian Clan. Without the Sicilian origins, that is.

Anyway. There’s grandma Cilli, in the centre, holding me in her arms. She’s my godmother, that’s why her stance and her face reflect honour and pride. She’s holding me tight, she’s holding me safe. A knowing half-smile shows around her lips.

To her right, my father. In a dark suit. Black-haired, handsome, slender, well-proportioned. He’s laughing at the camera, his teeth blinking, white and spotless. Ask everyone to look solemn, and he’ll still manage to laugh. He holds one of my tiny fingers in his big hand.

To Cilli’s left, my mother, wearing a mini-skirt, a white blouse, a light jacket, her gaze directed at my father’s head. She looks smitten. As if to protect me, she has placed one hand on my bald, shiny head.

The priest to her left leans slightly on her to make sure he’s on the photo. He folds his hands as if saying a prayer. Another protection for me. He crinkles his wise face into an enigmatic expression.

Up front, my cousins. Sulking because they hate wearing their Sunday best. They have already hated sitting still in church and putting up with that long, dull ceremony. Now, they’d rather play Cowboys and Red Indians than to behave well. One has scraped her knee on the way to church. The scab is barely visible under the seam of her short, white dress. She’s wearing an oxeye-daisy in her hair.

Aunt Lucia’s already grey hair stands out behind grandma Cilli and my parents. Her features are set, resolute, dynamic; she's holding my one-and-a-half-year-old sister Kathi in her arm. Who doesn’t look amused. No, the baby girl frowns as if questioning the whole thing.

My aunt’s other arm lies on grandma Berta’s shoulder. Berta leans against her daughter, a walking stick in her hand. She looks small and vulnerable, her lips drawn into a stern, unsmiling line.

Around the two, my other aunts and uncles.

Grandpa Ferdi stands on the right margin, you only see one half of his body, his protruding belly. He stands straight, upright, exhaling his workman’s pride, winking at the camera. You have to guess whether he’s doing it because something amuses him. Or because he’s staring into the sun.

On the other margin, grandpa Hans has been cut in two by the photographer, too. He wears a discreet, polite expression, as if he’d come across a stranger’s christening. As if he didn’t have anything to do with the rest of us.

In the very centre of the snapshot, a tiny worm, wound into a clear-coloured sheet. They say this was I. Only my hands and my hairless head jut out of the sheet. I seem to concentrate, to meditate something essential, my fat little face wrinkled with the effort.

But look closer.

You’ll discover that I’m fast asleep, probably dreaming, and ignoring the fuss and flurry they’re all making.


--- THE END ---