that lay between here and the highlands of the Teichalm.
Oma Nagl’s mania for washing clothes remained as strong as ever. She particularly liked to whack carpets and rugs, and heartily too, and had initiated Felix into the rug-whacker world when he was very small. It had always been so. Other memories eddied back to him now as he closed in on the doorway: Oma Nagl with her own sisters and neighbours in the yard on benches, like some African tribe, peeling and slicing turnips. It didn’t matter if it were gooseberries, apples, potatoes, turnips: she needed to be busy, to be in rhythm. She could as easily have lived the same ways of centuries ago.
In the yard was their old Opel, a vehicle that was rarely seen without a trailer or a roof-rack loaded with something. The need to replace parts only seemed to intensify Opa Nagl’s stubborn attachment to it, and the brand generally. Some years ago, Opa Nagl had made a run at Vienna with it, but had given up when the traffic began to surround him more and more approaching the city.
“That car has been to Vienna,” he would say. “Almost. But it knew when to stop. Better than any of those electronic things they put all over the cars now.”
A cat new to Felix was prowling in the yard, but the stationary fat one, Mitzi, was in her usual spot. She had always looked malignant, perhaps because she so seldom moved but merely glared with that negligent but somehow lethal detachment Felix had always read into her expression.
He saw tools on the ground near the tractor. Opa Nagl stepped out of the shed with a hesitant step, examining something, and looked over at the dog’s slowing antics.
“A senile dog,” he called out. “He won’t even bark. Servus Felix and how are you?”
Felix smiled and laid down his bags. His grandfather’s knuckles seemed to be even more misshapen by the arthritis.
“You look worn out,” said Felix’s opa. “Mein Gott, what the hell kind of shitty life are you leading now?”
It had always been so with Opa Nagl’s language, and Felix’s mother had long tired of trying to explain it. Farm talk, she used to call it, when Felix and Lisi were small. As they grew, she said it was perhaps psychological, or maybe a need to embarrass others.
“Who knows,” said Felix. “But they call it a job.”
Opa Nagl narrowed his glance.
“Hmm. I could guess,” he said, and winked. “A row. But don’t tell me. It’s great you’re here and you’ll get peace and quiet up here, I can tell you that.”
“You should have been a psychiatrist, Opa.”
Felix looked over pieces of the power-take-off assembly that his grandfather had taken apart, and then around the yard.
“Your oma is visiting down in the village. She’ll be along.”
His grandfather let his glasses back down from the top of his head, and with a soft sigh went down on one knee to examine the gearing.
“Only a couple of pigs now, Felix,” he said. “We rent out the fields again.”
“You’ll always have the speck. Nonnegotiable.”
“I wonder,” Opa Nagl grunted. “They’ll have that coming in from Bulgaria or Romania, or China, next. And you know what? It’ll be one tenth of the price, and it’ll taste better. You’ll see.”
“Aber geh weg: get out of here, Opa. You’re talking treason there.”
His grandfather squinted up at him. For a few moments Felix wondered if he had actually annoyed him.
“Don’t you city slickers read the paper?”
He held the wrench out straight, like a fencer, pointed at the fields and hills.
“Gerade aus,” he declared. “Straight ahead, go like hell to the future. That’s a train that makes no stops, Felix. Mark my words.”
“Globalization, isn’t that what they call it?”
Opa Nagl grunted as he put more pressure on a turn of the wrench.
“Wait for this Constitution thing,” he said. “We’ll show them.”
Then he groaned, cursed, and let down the wrench. He massaged his hand.
“Let me.”
“Leave it, Felix. I broke it, I’ll fix it. Okay? It’s the stupid fingers and knuckles that need a wrench.”
Slowly he stood, and drew out a rag from the back pocket of his overalls. His father used to joke that Opa Nagl had arrived in the world in the same blue overalls, cursing, that it had been this way since day one.
He watched his grandfather wipe his hands, holding them out one by one, stretching them. Those are claws now, he thought, not hands.
“What’ve you got there?”
“Just a few things, for the kitchen.”
“What? Flowers for your oma? And…? You want a bite to eat, are you peckish?”
Felix shook his head. He looked around the yard.
“Just a bit of peace and quiet, right?” said Opa Nagl. “The way things used to be.”
“Something like that I guess.”
Opa fixed him with a mischievous eye.
“Did I hear something there maybe?”
Felix pulled out two bottles.
“Prima. It’s been a long day. But stay out here, the house stinks of paint.”
They strolled over to the edge of the cement area Felix had helped lay while he was still in school. The pigs heard them and began shuffling about in the pen.
Berndt flopped down beside them and soon lay his snout flat over his paws, staring too, Felix imagined, at the faraway hills to the south. There was a slight glow to the sky there, broadening as Felix turned and looked over the house toward the West.
“Your father sat here, the same as you. Damn. My big mouth.”
Felix drank from the bottle again.
“I’m sorry,” Opa Nagl went on. “It’s probably the last thing you want to hear.”
Then, after a while, he spoke again.
“Only that it reminds me of him. He never showed up emptyhanded. What a man he was and you too. You’re not a complete loss to the city I mean.”
Felix smiled.
“Do you really believe that old stuff, Opa? Stadtleute and g’scherter, the city people and the country people stuff?”
“What if I do? Is that not allowed?”
Felix shrugged.
“Even if I don’t believe it, plenty do. Why else do we have the Freedom Party?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m a Green.”
“How can you be a Green and a policeman? That I don’t get.”
Felix eyed him.
“Okay,” Opa said. “So I have these rules in my head. But everyone does.”
“But all that country versus city stuff, it’s so, I don’t know, so ancient.”
“You think so?”
“The Internet, Opa. Osama Bin Laden. Mobile phones.
Turkey, the EU.”
“Jesus and Mary, you came all the way up here from Graz to educate your elders?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Wait until I tell our ancient Oma. She’ll take a wooden spoon to you hell, forget it, she’ll take a shovel to you, kid. She’s down with the Wagners there, down the hill a way. You talk about ‘ancient’? She’s been best friends with that Frieda since they were spots. Well kindergarten. And you know what? Their mothers were friends too. It all goes back.”
Felix drained the bottle and he began to study the label.
“Maybe you went to school with that Oetzi guy, did you?”
“Oetzi? I don’t know any Oetzi. Otto, I know. Otto Biedermeier?”
