The Old King in his Exile Read online

  The separation had been tough on him. He had been dead set against divorce, partly because he wanted to stay with my mother, and partly because he believed some things were absolutely binding. He had not fully realised that certain conventions had become unable to bear the heavy loads they carried. In stark contrast to today’s flexibility about such things, my father held to a decision he had made decades ago and didn’t want to break his vows. In this respect he belonged to a different generation from his wife, who was fifteen years younger. For her, it was not her reputation or word that was at stake, but her life and the possibility of finding happiness elsewhere. My mother left their house, while my father clung inwardly to the dead relationship, faithful to what he had already lost.

  As if something inside him had snapped, my mother’s departure led to a period of brooding and inaction. He even stopped looking after the garden, although he knew that his children were very busy with their jobs and struggled under the extra burden. He freed himself from practically all obligations. There was no trace of the enthusiasm with which he used to dive into projects. He announced that it was the young ones’ turn now – he’d already worked enough in his life.

  We were annoyed by his excuses, and excuses they were, although for something other than what we suspected. We thought his failings were a result of doing nothing. But it was the other way around: the doing nothing was a result of his failings. As even small tasks were now too much for him, and as he knew he was losing control, he surrendered all responsibility.

  Instead of watering the tomato plants every day, he spent his time playing patience and watching television. The monotony of his life revolted me. At a time when I was getting my career going, it seemed to me that dull indifference ruled his life. ‘Playing patience and watching television? That’s hardly enough for a life,’ I thought, and made no bones about my opinion. I pleaded with him, I teased and provoked him, I talked about inertia and the need for action. But even the most stubborn attempts to tear him out of his numbness failed dismally. With the look of a horse standing motionless in a storm, he would let my attacks wash over him. Then he’d go back to his routine.

  If, back then, I hadn’t needed to work several months each year as a sound man at the Bregenz Festival, earning the money that writing didn’t bring my way, I would have avoided the family home. I only had to be back for a few days before a deep misery descended on me. It was the same for my siblings. Gradually everyone left home. We children scattered. Life got tougher for our father.

  That was how we felt in the year 2000. Not only was the illness eating away at our father’s brain, it was also eating at the image that I had formed of him. Throughout my childhood and youth I had been proud to be his son. Now I was increasingly thinking of him as a halfwit.

  Jacques Derrida was not wrong when he said that when you write, you are always asking for forgiveness.

  *

  Aunt Hedwig tells a story of a visit she and Emil – the eldest of my father’s six brothers – once paid him. Emil had brought hair clippers and a towel, although Aunt Hedwig no longer remembers whether my father let Emil cut his hair. It was mid-afternoon. To Aunt Hedwig’s surprise, there was a plate with leftover tomato sauce on the coffee table by the sofa. Later my father dropped a glass, and when he looked helplessly at it, Aunt Hedwig offered to clean up the shards. She asked him where he kept the dustpan and brush. He couldn’t recall. Looking at her, his eyes suddenly filled with tears. That was the moment when she knew.

  They didn’t talk about it. Silently my father fought with himself. He didn’t attempt to explain anything. He didn’t attempt to escape – not until the pilgrimage to Lourdes.

  That was in 1998, with Maria, the eldest of his three sisters, Erich, his youngest surviving brother, and Waltraud, his sister-in-law. My father, who hadn’t gone on a single holiday with his wife and children because – so he always said – he had seen the world during the war, now set off on a comparatively long journey with the faint hope of healing.

  And then to stand there with an empty smile and pray at night and – as if the night prayers had no power – to do it again in the morning.

  Maria, who by then was none too steady on her feet, apparently said to him, ‘You walk for me, and I’ll think for you.’

  *

  What we don’t understand terrifies us most. Which is why the situation improved for us once the signs accumulated that our father was affected by more than just forgetfulness and a lack of motivation. When everyday tasks presented him with insoluble problems, absent-mindedness could no longer be invoked as an excuse. It was impossible to keep fooling ourselves. Dressing himself in the morning, our father would only put on half his clothes, or put them on backwards or put on four sets. At lunch he would stick a frozen pizza, still in its plastic wrap, into the oven, and put his socks in the fridge. There came a time when we knew our father was affected by dementia and not just letting himself go – though we were slow to grasp the full extent of the horror.

  For years the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. My childhood image of my father blocked it out. As absurd as it sounds, dementia was the last thing I expected from him.

  *

  Our insight into the true situation came as a relief to all. Now there was an acceptable explanation for the chaos of the last few years. We no longer felt so utterly devastated, though our relief was tinged by the bitterness of knowing we had wasted so much time fighting a phantom – time that we should have been using much more wisely. If we had been cleverer, more attentive and more engaged, we would have spared our father and ourselves a lot of trouble. We would have taken better care of him and found time to ask more questions before it was too late.

  *

  The onset of the illness was a terrible time, a complete failure. What’s more, it was the time of the greatest losses.

  By that I mean the loss of my father’s memories and the physical disappearance of items that had been important to him. His bicycle from the fifties, a three-speed with curving handlebars and a leather saddle with squeaky springs. For decades, even on snow and ice, my father had ridden it to the parish offices where he had started as a clerk at the age of twenty-six. Lost. The headshot that had been taken right after the war, of a young man who weighed not much over six stone. Lost. My father had carried the photo around for almost sixty years in his wallet, along with a photo of his mother. Things he treasured.

  I told a friend that seeing my barely nineteen-year-old father in this photo, just a few days after his discharge from a Russian military hospital, had made a strong impression on me. At that hospital, he recovered from dysentery, more by luck than medical care, after weeks in unimaginable conditions and on the verge of the grave.

  He used to enjoy showing people the photo. In it he had very short hair, bony features, and a look that was hard to fathom but suggested both clarity and fear in his darkly gleaming eyes, which were sympathetic. You wouldn’t tease a man for keeping a photo like that in his wallet instead of one of the wife and kids.

  Before I left for Wolfurt, the same friend urged me to make a copy of the photo. She was surprised I hadn’t done so yet. That was in 2004. Coming from Berlin, I arrived at my father’s house in the afternoon. While my father was sitting in Peter and Ursula’s garden, watching his grandchildren play, as he did just about every afternoon, I patted down all his jackets and trousers, rummaged through drawers and wardrobes, just as I had done decades ago as a child, when I snooped around the house. This time my snooping was in vain. I called Helga to ask if she knew where our father’s wallet was. She said that it hadn’t been around for years, because he’d lost it. I still remember how devastated I was, how angry – angry at myself, angry at all of us – because we hadn’t done something in time.

  I mentioned the photo to my father that evening. He came up with a far-fetched story about being in Egypt and in Greece, where his trousers had been stolen, and along with them his wallet.

  ‘How? What? Where?’ I ask
ed, severely shaken. Suddenly it was clear that not just a photo had been discarded, but also my father’s knowledge of his past.

  ‘Dad, you say you were in Egypt?’

  ‘Not voluntarily, of course. But as part of the evacuation of children during the war.’

  ‘And how did you find it?’ I asked reluctantly.

  ‘It was boring.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t see or experience anything. I was there as a nobody, a no-good no-hoper.’

  ‌

  How was your childhood, Dad?

  Good. Harmless. What we had was all a bit primitive, in terms of its nature, quantity, as well as its effectiveness.

  Do you often think about it?

  I can remember some things, but I no longer know everything. I think I’ve left all that behind.

  What do you recall about your father?

  Nothing right now.

  But you had a father?

  Yes, of course.

  So he wasn’t anyone particularly important in your life?

  I have to say he wasn’t. He didn’t have many important thoughts. He wasn’t cerebral enough.

  And your mother?

  My mother! From her I learnt to be humble. She was an unassuming person, always friendly and ready to help. She liked everyone.

  ‌

  Children called August are rare these days. And yet the name served my father well for eight and a half decades. Only his classmates shortened it to ‘Gustl’. Everyone else – parents, siblings, colleagues, wife – used his full name throughout his life. August.

  The third of ten children, he was born on 4 July 1926. His parents owned a small farm in Wolfurt, a Rhine Valley village in Austria’s westernmost region, the Vorarlberg. Due to the local laws of inheritance, the district has no large farms. My father’s parents had three cows, an orchard, a ploughed field, a meadow, a small wood, a licence to distil three hundred litres of schnapps, and a beehive. A family with so many children couldn’t live off that. Adolf Geiger, their Dätt (‘dad’ in the local Alemannic dialect), brought in a salary working for the nascent electric power industry. He rode his bike through the villages of the Lower Rhine Valley and read people’s meters.

  When Dätt got a flat from a stray horseshoe nail, he would leave his bike in front of the house for one of his kids, normally August, to patch the tyre. I also used to put my bike in front of the house for my father to patch. And just as my father had to obey his parents, it was later expected that he would obey his children. His children were born into a different world and thought they knew best how things should be done.

  Dätt was good with numbers, but otherwise not particularly gifted nor physically strong. He preferred giving orders to working, because everyone else in the family was more skilled and soon also stronger than he was, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of his wife and children. For the same reason, Dätt never explained how to do or make anything. He just ordered that it be done. That way he avoided ever being told how to do it better.

  Dätt was an authoritarian. He often lost control and slapped his children. Nevertheless, his children’s strategy wasn’t always one of avoidance. When they could no longer bear the nonsense that he spouted, they would argue with him (so say Maria and Paul).

  The older children saw Dätt as a nuisance and steered clear of him when possible. They set off for Mass three minutes before or after him, but never with him. From the edge of the family he made an effort to have a better relationship with the younger children. He behaved better with them, played board games like Fox and Geese, and took them on long walks. He was already older by then. But the boxings he gave their ears still echo in their stories.

  Once, Dätt had his son Emil, then fourteen, carry him on his back over the Schwarzach stream. That was in 1937. He couldn’t be bothered to take his shoes off, apparently.

  And they say he read a lot. But along with his slapping, reading was not something that he passed on to his children. Their mother’s personality traits were more infectious.

  Their Mam, as they called her, was cleverer than Dätt. That’s what my father said when the threads of memory still tied him to such things. Warm-hearted and friendly, she was a slim but strong woman with well-defined biceps. Her father was the blacksmith in Wolfurt. In her youth, before she started to work as an embroiderer, she helped out in the smithy, because she had no brothers and because her father noticed that she was a quick learner.

  The smithy is up on a hill at the edge of the woods, behind the schloss, and it has a large waterwheel. Before and after World War I, a truck from Dornbirn would leave the materials the smith had ordered at the end of the road leading to the castle, and after school the smith’s five daughters would carry the long iron bars up the steep road.

  Mam was a quiet woman who hated it when people fussed over her. She saw life as the preparation for heaven. Her children speak of her with nothing but respect, which is probably why they have so few stories to tell about her. It was said that Theresia Geiger was one of the three hardest-working women in the village, so much so that she often felt like a servant girl, and wouldn’t have been worse off if she’d continued working for her father at the anvil, hammering iron until it glowed. There was farm work to attend to, and there were always little children whose nappies needed changing. Every evening she would be soaked from wringing water out of washed cloth nappies. Sometimes she would lie down on the sofa during the day and ask one of her children to wake her up in five minutes. They just let their mother sleep.

  When they went to gather fruit, Mam would say before they set out, ‘God bless our work.’

  Irene, my father’s youngest sister, still remembers that when she goes out to the fields.

  For almost two decades, a large fruit crate with a small child inside stood in the field as they worked. The children learnt to walk in that fruit crate. Dätt’s initials were burned into the wood: A.G. The brand was courtesy of his father-in-law, the smith, whose speciality was creating branding irons – letters and symbols. He had sold them widely, from Hungary to Paris, and yet he remained poor, up on the castle mound from where you could see over into Appenzell in Switzerland, across Lake Constance to Lindau and, if the weather was good, as far as Friedrichshafen.

  Theresia Geiger would say to her children, ‘Don’t come home too late, and if you do, then do it quietly please, so I don’t wake up.’

  The daily routine barely changed at all. Mam woke all the children early in the morning, rousing them several times until they were finally up. Often the children had to run to school, because they had cut it too close with their timing. They didn’t have great footwear. In the winter, snow stuck to their wooden soles, so that they had to stop and keep knocking off the clumps. The wooden shoes crunched through the snow, which often fell around St Nicholas’s Day and lay on the ground until spring.

  At breakfast they dunked Riebel, the traditional pan-fried cornmeal porridge eaten by the poor, in a bowl of warm milk. Mam and Dätt drank coffee. Only Dätt got honey, except on Sundays, when there was honey for all. After the meal, prayers were said for unfortunate souls.

  In that family, the children weren’t brought up, but ‘kept’ – the same as for cows. It was the children’s task to keep the cows, and the parents’ task to keep the children.

  By today’s standards the children didn’t have a balanced diet. They had almost no vegetables and very little meat, but a lot of milk, bread and lard. They longed for the first fruit of the year. Sometimes in summer, one child would wake at five in the morning and creep outside to see if any early ‘hay’ pears had fallen. The children each ferreted away little troves of their finds, so that they wouldn’t have to share with their brothers and sisters.

  The privations of their childhood were not extreme, given the general conditions then. It was harder to bear the scarcity of affection and attention from their parents. Because of the large number of children, demand far exceeded supply. Everything had to be shared many ways.

&nbs
p; As soon as a child could hold a tool, their help was expected. The little ones looked after the littlest while the older children worked. The horse that had been borrowed from the neighbour had to be rid of its flies so it wouldn’t bolt. The children were sent out to the boggy patch to gather acorns for the pigs in the sty. Josef, the fourth of the seven sons, was once found unconscious under an oak, because he had fallen out of the tree. When the grass was mowed, the children would pick out the plants that the cows shouldn’t eat: hogweed and curly dock. They used a handcart to take the apples to market in Bregenz and Mam would follow later on her bike. On the way home my father and Paul, who was a year younger, couldn’t resist playing around. They would take turns sitting in the handcart while the other one was the horse. Their nailed clogs clacked on the cobbles. Back then children still owned the roads.

  They understood the phrase putting your back into it quite literally. The boys would pull the hay wagon and garner taunts from the girls: ‘Spare the horses, use an ass!’

  There was boys’ work and girls’ work. The boys had to clean out the barn and the girls got up at five in the morning to weed the field before school.

  Once a storm completely flattened the field. The children spent a day with wire and stakes, tying the maize plants up. The family relied on the corn for their daily Riebel.

  The family was largely self-sufficient, buying only bread, flour, sugar and salt – the absolute necessities. Toilet paper was cut in strips of a hand’s breadth from old newspapers. This too was a chore for the children. One of them would sit at the parlour table and tear up the paper.

  Paper was needed to light the stove too. There was almost no waste. The family had a stove, a dungheap and a pig.