The Old King in his Exile Read online

  Increasingly, I saw my father as a person who had nothing in common with me. And as it wasn’t possible to direct my youthful need for rebellion against my father’s authority (since he never showed any desire to lord it over anyone), I took the alternative route and rebelled against my father’s ignorance. Most people tend to find their parents’ care is either excessive or lacking. I reproached him for not showing any interest, but my accusations didn’t get a rise out of him, which annoyed me all the more. I couldn’t understand his behaviour and so neither could I accept it. There came a time when I wrote him off as someone I no longer wanted to bother with. I had enough ‘other problems’. That was true, but it was also a cop-out, because I had become interested in other things, as happens at that age. It got so bad that, to be honest, I wasn’t hoping for a future where the gap between my father and me would close again. Back then my father wasn’t particularly important to me; at times I ignored him completely.

  As a teenager, I noticed that he wasn’t quick or harsh in his judgements, and that he didn’t like to speak ill or thoughtlessly of others. I valued that in him, from an ever greater distance.

  He was now spending a lot of time in his cellar workshop. There, he was free to let his thoughts wander and dive into crazy schemes. There he could keep his life free of external events. His workshop was his refuge and his natural home. Even today I am amazed at how well he organised it. In the seventies he fixed a wide board to the low ceiling and nailed the lids of baby-food jars onto it, screw sides facing down. He filled the jars with the small items he had sorted, and dozens of jars hung from the ceiling, easy to take in at a glance – so perfectly ordered that even his wife and children could always find what they were looking for.

  If someone asked, ‘Where’s Dad?’ the answer was normally, ‘Probably in his workshop.’

  ‘What’s he tinkering with?’

  ‘Oh, something or other.’

  *

  My memories of the time are full of situations like that. We didn’t want our father, who was pottering about on the edge of our family life, to disturb us in absentia: the electric drill in the cellar that blurred the television screen, the constant knocking and rapping from some corner or other when we children had homework to do or wanted to read. When my father got ill, my first thoughts followed the same pattern – I didn’t want my father to withdraw due to his illness and by his absence affect me. In fact, he continued to live his autonomous Robinson Crusoe existence when he fell ill. His family was the background he needed – the sea and the wind and the forest and the goats and his Man Friday.

  Robinson Crusoe is the only novel that our father read in his whole life, and he read it many times. It is one of the few masterpieces of world literature in which not love, but instead self-assertion, is the most important element. Our father christened his first car (a 1934 DKW convertible) ‘Robinson’. He even drove that car down to South Tyrol for several days with friends. That was in 1955, the year he bought it, long before he married my mother.

  *

  The eighties were marching on. My parents had not exactly developed into paragons of domestic harmony. Time had brought out, rather than smoothed away, their differences. There was an ugly atmosphere at home, and their children’s growing up hastened the disintegration. And because it’s assumed that a family should be harmonious, soon each of us had the sense of being in the wrong. The time came when all of us felt isolated, left to our own devices and busy with our own affairs, which were of no concern to anyone else.

  Uncle Josef once said, ‘In our home a lot of things weren’t right either. When we had a problem at school, we didn’t even tell one of our brothers. And when we were happy about something, we kept it to ourselves – we went to our rooms and leapt up and down.’

  When I was a teenager, I saw things that way too. I could only feel at home by blocking myself off from my family. Towards the end, we were all fed up with each other. At least it felt like that to me.

  By the time I left high school, our family’s breakdown was having a noticeable impact on everyone’s state of mind. Thankfully, the process wasn’t irreversible, as we learnt when the situation improved in later years. All of this has been wiped clean from my father’s mind. For now, only my memory lingers.

  During my school years I didn’t always make life easy for my mother and father. My mother, too, was starting to find the boundaries of her existence constricting. When I think back, I’m no longer surprised that she was often in a bad mood. We arrived at my school-leavers’ ball after an argument at home, and at the event my mother remained annoyed because, of all my schoolmates, I was the only one not wearing a collared shirt. My father took me aside to talk about it with me in his calm way, asking how I would feel if he bought a shirt from one of the waiters. To show me that he was serious, he took his wallet (with the photo) out of the inner pocket of his jacket. I could see that he had enough money with him. He told me that that every waiter kept a spare shirt in case they spilt something, and I should think about it – it wouldn’t hurt to do it. I looked at him as if he were from another planet and refused, saying that I didn’t want to stand there in the waiter’s shirt. Looking back, I can see that his suggestion was made in good faith, and that he was trying to keep the peace.

  *

  A few weeks later I left Wolfurt and headed off to university.

  ‌

  What’s the most important thing in life to you, Dad?

  I don’t know. I’ve experienced a lot of things. But… ‘important’?

  Does anything spring to mind?

  It’s important that people around you talk in a friendly way. Then most things are fine.

  What don’t you like as much?

  When I have to obey. I don’t like being hurried here and there.

  Who hurries you?

  Right now – nobody.

  ‌

  On cold or rainy days at the end of the seventies, we sat at the kitchen table and played The Game of Life, a harmless enough board game about financial success, suitable for children aged ten and up. The brightly illustrated board led you through all of life’s stages. You spun a wheel and took whatever the wheel dictated: education, travels, marriage, success, a lack of success, houses that were built, houses that burned down again, setbacks in your career, an oil strike, bad investments, your silver wedding anniversary, retirement. We were unaware at the time that the route around the board was a piece of cake compared to what was actually ahead of us. And we had no idea that it really is often a matter of luck whether you fall back or get ahead.

  When someone had an accident or missed a turn because of an illness, we laughed with glee.

  *

  My father’s spatial orientation was deteriorating. At night he would wander around the village in his pyjamas. We were worried he’d have an accident. To make sure someone could keep an eye on him at night too, we decided on a twenty-four-hour care shift schedule. The door to the staircase was locked at night.

  The Slovakian women who came to the house brought order to our father’s daily routine. The constant stream of new faces entering his bedroom each morning had left him confused. Now his morale improved and we could see his vitality returning. This change, and the fact that as the illness progressed its impact was milder, allowed our father to enter a relatively good period. No two people affected by dementia are alike, and any generalisations are problematic. Those affected by the illness remain essentially unfathomable, each one of them a particular case with his or her own abilities and feelings, in whom dementia takes a different course. In my father’s case, it progressed slowly and the less he was aware of his wretched condition, the less the disease affected his mood. And when he was still aware of the dementia, it no longer scared him. Calmly, he accepted his fate, and his underlying positive attitude was once again visible.

  He now seldom wandered around the house looking for a port in a storm. There were still situations in which he wanted to go home, but the wish w
as no longer accompanied by panic. His voice often sounded peaceful, like the voice of someone who knows life always ends badly and that there’s no point in getting worked up about it.

  ‘I’m going home now,’ he said once, when he was tired of waiting any longer for someone to take him. ‘Are you coming with me or staying here?’

  ‘I’ll stay here.’

  ‘OK, then I’m going on my own. Why would I wait here and then, perhaps, go home in November? And maybe have to pay something, too. My only chance is to go now.’

  ‘Yes, you might as well go.’

  ‘Can I go?’

  ‘If you want to. No one’s stopping you.’

  ‘And one more thing, my family – can I take them, too?’

  ‘Of course. Take them too.’

  ‘Good. Thank you.’

  He looked around to see if he could think of anything else he ought to take, and, satisfied there wasn’t, said, ‘Nothing here affects me personally.’

  Then he came over to the table again. I could see from the expression on his face that he found something a little embarrassing. He hesitated, but in the end came out with what was bothering him.

  ‘Could you give me the address? Or directions? I mean, you just have to tell me, “Go up the street until you see the house.”’

  The manner in which he asked for my help touched me deeply. I said, ‘I’ve thought about it – I’ll go with you. If you can wait half an hour, until I’ve finished typing, we’ll go together.’

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Home,’ I said. ‘I feel like going home, too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. But before we go, you should rest a bit and gather your strength.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Far enough. But we can walk it.’

  ‘And you really would come too?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You’d do that?’

  I took his hand and squeezed it briefly. ‘More than happy to.’

  He liked that answer. A smile immediately lit up his whole face, and, grasping my hand, he exclaimed, ‘Thank you!’

  Then he sat down at the table and we had a fairly peaceful evening until his carer put him to bed.

  *

  At this time, he mostly thought I was his brother Paul. I didn’t care – at least it was family. Nor did I mind when he greeted me in the morning with a sing-song, ‘Hello-o, dear bro-o-ther.’

  Sometimes he swapped over mid-sentence. He introduced me once as his brother Paul, ‘the forester’, before adding, ‘He’s a poet and thinker.’

  He almost never ran away any more. He liked to sit on the little wall in front of the house or stand on the terrace and look at the village below. I sometimes expected that he, as if healthy again, was going to turn to me and start a casual conversation. We’d never had anything other than casual conversations. He’d never had a serious discussion with me, never given me advice. I can’t remember any fatherly chats. His MO was to comment on the weather or the shifts in the landscape.

  When you saw him in the dappled shade of one of the trees, you might think everything was fine.

  Back then, I thought the time remaining was short. I wondered where we would be next year, or the year after. Two or three years – that’s about the time I take to write a novel. Three years, the length of time that I believed I would be able to reach my father. So I came to Vorarlberg as often as I could and gave his carers afternoons off, so I could spend time alone with him.

  Most days went very peacefully. Sometimes I thought there was something wrong with my ears, because I wasn’t used to the silence. As I worked, my father sat opposite me at the kitchen table. He slid his hands back and forth over its surface, sometimes took rapid and rhythmical breaths, or fiddled with the newspaper rack, but mostly he was calm. Sometimes he asked a question and we talked, and sometimes he peered over at my laptop screen and read along. When I asked him if he was interested in what I was writing, he said, ‘Yes, I’m allowed some interest.’

  Then he sat down again and his face went blank, as if he were dreaming. His absent-mindedness made me feel he was his old self again. He played with his fingers as if there were nothing more urgent at that moment, occasionally asking me to let him know, should I need any help. ‘Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘I know I don’t get good results any more. My performance is weak. It’s difficult. I won’t be able to help you much.’

  I said, ‘Of everyone, you help me the most.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ he replied.

  ‘But it’s true, you help me the most.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to say so.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  He brooded over that for a moment before saying, ‘Then for now, I’ll take note of that.’

  When he sat alone in the living room, he often sang, and more and more often he would really belt it out. I thought that if he continued like that he’d make it to ninety. He led a healthy life, after all. Every day he had regular meals, sang, went for walks and slept long. There was no meat on Fridays: his Slovakian carers held to that. And on Sundays they would accompany him to church, if Peter and his family had already gone the previous evening.

  *

  When he sang, he would change the words for fun. In speech, too, he became more inventive again. His former mischievousness returned, like the beauty you see when an overgrown garden has been thinned out a little.

  ‘I also took part in those things,’ he said. ‘But please don’t mistake that “part” for something big – I think small.’

  I was impressed by how he expressed himself, I felt in contact with words’ magic potential. James Joyce claimed that he had no imagination but simply accepted what language offered him. It seemed the same with my father. From the German word zukünftig (‘of the future’), he switched letters to make kuhzünftig (‘of the cows’ guild’). When I announced that I was stumped, which in German is to be ‘at the end of my Latin’, am Ende des Lateins, he again switched letters, saying he himself wasn’t so much am Ende des Lateins as am Ende des Daseins (‘at the end of his existence’), stressing the words in a way that emphasised his pun. And some old phrases that I hadn’t heard for a long time came back:

  ‘You can’t make the sheet bigger by pulling at it.’

  ‘A good stumbler won’t fall.’

  ‘You act as if you had shoe nails in your soup.’

  When he couldn’t think of a word, he would say, ‘I don’t know how I should christen it.’

  Words popped easily out of his mouth. He was relaxed and said what he thought, and what he thought was often not only original but had hidden depths. Why don’t I think like that! I was amazed at how precisely he expressed himself, how he would get the tone just right, how skilfully he chose his words. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘we’re going to make life as nice as possible for each other, and if that doesn’t work out, one of us will be left standing.’

  At such times it was as if he were stepping out of the house of his illness to enjoy the fresh air. For short periods he was once again himself. We had some lovely hours, all the more special because they were wrestled from the illness.

  ‘My assessment is that I’m doing well,’ he said. ‘I’m now an old man. Now I have to do what I like doing and see how things turn out.’

  ‘And what do you want to do, Dad?’

  ‘Nothing, actually. That’s the beauty of it, you know. It takes skill.’

  *

  Even when blood in his urine proved to be the result of a bladder tumour, he didn’t seem put out. He remained cheerful and was just a little ‘surprised’. Only after the operation was he out of sorts, because of the anaesthetic and the strange environment. Everyone was happy when the doctors finally discharged him. He quickly recovered and even knew that he was home. No small feat.

  In the hospital, he had woken up and said to his carer, Daniela, that he was in pain. Daniela replied that she couldn’t help him, but she would stay there with hi
m. He then said, ‘If you stay here with me, that’s already a great help.’

  My father was also diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and every morning he showed a remarkable ability to swallow pills of any size without water, while making a comical, screwed-up face. He would only drink the water when the pill was already down.

  For a while he hadn’t been able to recognise the television as another reality. He asked how it was that when he looked over, there would be a room he didn’t know one minute, and a car the next.

  ‘How did the car get in here?’

  This reached a new level one day around Christmas when he was watching the news on the sofa. He got up and offered the newsreader the tray of Christmas biscuits, encouraging him to take one. When the man didn’t respond, our father took one of the jam biscuits, and, holding it up to the spot where the newsreader’s mouth was moving, suggested he try it. The man’s continued rudeness irritated our father. The scene, in spite of its comedic value, scared us. It was eerie.

  The illness was certainly bringing forth some outlandish fruit by this time. These strange episodes were normally short, and often they indicated that our father didn’t feel his best. His condition could quickly alter, depending on whether or not he was in good hands.

  Some of his carers were like dear friends to him; others didn’t manage to make him feel safe and secure. Then he would get confused and scared, and would start to panic because he thought he was in real danger.

  ‘They’re shooting – take cover!’ he shouted. ‘It’s the Swiss, shooting at us again!’

  *

  Grey, slightly brown smoke rose up from my grandparents’ house. Uncle Robert was making schnapps. That morning, Uncle Erich had been out in the field with a bucket and a small shovel, digging up the young oaks that had taken seed. The smoke from the chimney had become almost invisible – maybe it was the second stage of distillation. From my window I could see the walnut tree beyond the chimney shimmering a little in a haze.