3,096 Days (2 page)

On the way back to the swimming area, I bounded about in high spirits, humming to myself, ‘I can do anything if I want it enough and believe in myself enough.’ I felt more light-hearted and untroubled than I had in a long time.

However, my euphoria was cut short. The afternoon was already getting on, but my father wasn’t making any move to leave the spa. When we finally returned to his holiday house, he again didn’t seem to be in any great hurry. Just the opposite. He even wanted to lie down for a short while. I glanced nervously at the clock. We had promised my mother that we would be home by seven o’clock, because the next day was a school day. I knew that there would be a heated discussion if we didn’t get back to Vienna on time. While he lay snoring on the couch, the clock kept ticking away inexorably. It was already dark when my father finally woke up and we began the trip home. I sat in the back seat pouting and saying nothing. We wouldn’t make it on time, my mother would be angry, and everything that had been so pleasant this afternoon would be ruined in one fell swoop. As always, I would be caught in the middle. Adults always ruined everything. When my father stopped at a petrol station and bought me a chocolate bar, I crammed the whole thing into my mouth at once.

It wasn’t until 8.30, one and a half hours late, that we arrived
at the Rennbahnsiedlung council estate. ‘I’ll let you out here, run home quickly,’ said my father and gave me a kiss.

‘I love you,’ I muttered as always when saying goodbye. Then I ran through the dark courtyard to our stairway and unlocked the door. In the foyer there was a note from my mother next to the telephone: ‘I’ve gone to the cinema. Be back later.’ I put my bag down and hesitated a moment. Then I scribbled a short note to my mother that I would wait for her at our neighbour’s flat, one floor below ours. When she came to pick me up there a while later, she was beside herself.

‘Where is your father?’ she barked at me.

‘He didn’t come with me. He dropped me off out the front,’ I said quietly. It wasn’t my fault we were late and it wasn’t my fault that he hadn’t walked me to our front door. But still I felt guilty.

‘Jesus Christ! You are hours late. Here I’ve been, worrying. How could he let you cross the courtyard by yourself? In the middle of the night? Something could have happened to you. I’ll tell you one thing: You are not to see your father any more. I’m so sick and tired of this and I won’t put up with it any longer!’

When I was born on 17 February 1988, my mother was thirty-eight years old and already had two grown-up daughters. She had had my first half-sister when she was just eighteen years old and the second came about a year later. That was at the end of the 1960s. The two small children were more than my mother, who was on her own, could handle. She and the girls’ father had divorced soon after the birth of my second half-sister. It was not easy for her to make a living for her small family. She had to struggle, took a pragmatic approach to things, was somewhat tough on herself and did everything in order to get her children through. There was no place in her life for sentimentality or a lack of assertiveness, for leisure or lightness. At thirty-eight, now that both girls were grown up, she was free from the obligations and worries of raising
children for the first time in a long while. It was exactly at that time that I came along. My mother had not counted on getting pregnant again.

The family that I was born into was actually in the process of dissolving itself once again. I turned everything on its head. All of the baby stuff had to be brought out of storage, and daily life had to adjust one more time to the needs of an infant. Even though I was welcomed with joy and spoilt like a little princess by everybody, as a child I sometimes felt like the third wheel. I had to fight to establish myself in a world where all the roles had already been assigned.

When I was born, my parents had been together for several years. A customer of my mother’s had introduced them. As a trained seamstress, my mother had earned a living for herself and her two daughters by selling and altering clothing for the women in the neighbourhood. One of her customers was a woman from the town of Süssenbrunn bei Wien, who ran a bakery and a small grocery store with her husband and her son. Ludwig Koch Junior accompanied his mother sometimes when she came to try on the clothes and always stayed a bit longer than necessary to chat with my mother. She soon fell in love with the young, handsome baker who made her laugh with his stories. After a while, he moved in with her and her two girls, into her flat in the large block of council flats situated on the northern outskirts of Vienna.

Here, the edge of the city bleeds into the flat countryside of the Marchfeld plain, unable to decide what exactly it wants to be. It is an incongruous area with no centre and no identity, where everything seems possible and chance reigns supreme. Commercial areas and factories stand surrounded by fallow fields where dogs from the neighbouring council estates roam the unmowed grassy areas in packs. In the midst of this, the nuclei of former villages struggle to maintain their identities, which are peeling away just as the paint slowly flakes off from the façades of the
small Biedermeier-era houses. They are relics of bygone days, slowly replaced by innumerable council flat buildings, utopias of social housing construction, set down in the middle of a green field with a grand gesture and left to fend for themselves. I grew up in one of the largest of these council estates.

The council flats located on Rennbahnweg were designed on a drawing board in the 1970s and built as the stony embodiment of urban planners’ vision, urban planners looking to create a new environment for new people: happy, industrious families of the future, lodged in modern satellite cities characterized by clean lines, shopping centres and excellent public transport into Vienna.

At first glance, the experiment seems to have been successful. The council estate consists of 2,400 flats housing over 7,000 people. The courtyards between the tower blocks are generously proportioned and shaded by large trees. Playgrounds alternate with areas of concrete and large grassy sections. You can picture very clearly how urban planners placed miniatures of mothers with prams and children playing in their mock-ups and were convinced that they had created a space for an entirely new kind of shared environment. The flats, stacked one on top of the other in towers of up to fifteen storeys, were – compared to the stuffy and substandard tenement buildings closer to the centre – airy and well-proportioned, equipped with balconies and appointed with modern bathrooms.

But from the beginning the council estate was a catch-all for people originating from outside Vienna who had wanted to move to the city but had never quite made it that far: blue-collar workers from other Austrian provinces, such as Lower Austria, Burgenland and Styria. Slowly but surely, immigrants moved in as well with whom the other residents squabbled daily about minor issues, such as cooking smells, playing children and varying opinions regarding noise levels. The atmosphere in the area became more and more aggressive, and the nationalistic and xenophobic graffiti
slogans increased. Shops with cheap merchandise opened up in the shopping centres, and milling about in the large squares in front of these were teenagers and people without jobs who drowned their frustrations in alcohol.

Today the council estate has been renovated, the tower blocks gleam in bright new colours and the Vienna underground station nearby has finally been completed. But when I lived there as a child, the Rennbahnsiedlung estate was viewed as a typical hotspot for social problems. It was considered dangerous to walk through the area at night, and during the day it was awkward having to pass the groups of teenagers who spent their time hanging around the courtyards and shouting dirty comments at women. My mother always hurried through the courtyards and stairwells holding tight to my hand. Despite being a resolute, quick-witted woman, she hated the coarse remarks she was subjected to at Rennbahnweg. She tried as best she could to protect me; she explained why she did not like it when she saw me playing in the courtyard and why she found the neighbours vulgar. Of course, as a child I was unable to really understand what she meant, but most of the time I did what she told me.

I vividly remember as a small girl how I resolved time and again to go down into the courtyard anyway and to play there. I spent hours getting ready, imagining what I would say to the other kids, and changed my clothes over and over. I chose toys for the sandbox and tossed them aside. I thought long and hard about what doll it would be best for me to take in order to make friends. But when I actually made it down to the courtyard, I never stayed longer than just a few minutes: I could never shake off the feeling that I didn’t belong. Despite my lack of understanding, I had internalized my parents’ negative attitude to such an extent that my own council estate remained unfamiliar territory. I preferred instead to escape in daydreams, lying on my bed in my room. That room – with its pink painted walls, light-coloured wall-to-wall carpet and
patterned curtain sewn by my mother that was never opened even during the day – enshrouded me protectively. Here I forged great plans and spent hours thinking about where my path in life would likely lead. At any rate, I knew that I did not want to put down any roots here on the council estate.

For the first few months of my life I was the centre of our family. My sisters took care of the new baby as if they were practising for later in life. While one fed and changed my nappies, the other took me with her in the baby sling into the city centre to stroll up and down along the streets of Vienna’s shopping districts where passers-by stopped to admire my wide smile and my pretty clothes. My mother was overjoyed when they told her about what had happened. She worked hard to make sure I looked good and outfitted me from infancy with the prettiest clothes, which she spent long evenings sewing for me herself. She chose special fabrics, leafed through fashion magazines to find the latest sewing patterns or bought little accessories for me in boutiques. Everything was colour-coordinated, even my socks. In the midst of a neighbourhood where many women went about wearing curlers in their hair and most men shuffled to the supermarket in shell-suit bottoms, I was turned out like a mini fashion model. This overemphasis on outward appearances was not only an act of distancing ourselves from our environment, it was also my mother’s way of demonstrating how much she loved me.

Her brisk, resolute nature made it difficult for her to allow herself to show her emotions. She was not the type of person who was always hugging and cuddling a child. Tears and gushing pronouncements of love alike always made her uncomfortable. My mother, whose early pregnancies had forced her to grow up so quickly, had developed a thick skin over the years. She allowed herself no ‘weaknesses’ and refused to tolerate them in others. As a child I often watched her gain the upper hand on colds through
sheer willpower and observed with fascination as she removed steaming hot dishes from the dishwasher without wincing. ‘An Indian knows no pain’ was her credo – a certain amount of toughness doesn’t hurt, but actually helps you assert yourself in the world.

My father was just the opposite. He opened his arms wide when I wanted to cuddle him and had great fun playing with me – that is, when he was awake. During the time when he still lived with us, he was asleep more often than not when I saw him. My father loved going out at night, drinking copious amounts of alcohol with his friends. Consequently, he was ill suited to his trade. He had taken over the bakery from his father without ever really having any great interest in it. But having to get up so early in the morning caused him the greatest suffering. He stayed out in bars until midnight, and when the alarm clock rang at two in the morning it was extremely difficult to wake him. Once all of the rolls had been delivered, he lay on the couch for hours snoring. His enormous round belly raised and lowered formidably before my fascinated child’s eyes. I played with the large sleeping man, placed teddy bears against his cheek, decorated him with ribbons and bows, put bonnets on him and painted his fingernails. When he awoke in the afternoon, he tossed me through the air, producing small surprises from his sleeves as if by magic. Then he would go out once again to make his rounds of the bars and cafés in town.

My grandmother became the most important point of reference for me during this time. With her – she ran the bakery together with my father – I felt completely safe and at home. She lived just a few minutes away from us by car and yet it was like another world. Süssenbrunn, situated on the northern outskirts of the city, is one of the oldest villages in Vienna, and the ever-encroaching city has never been able to destroy its rural character. The peaceful
side streets are lined with old single-family dwellings with gardens where people still grow vegetables. My grandmother’s house, which also included a small grocery and the bakery, still looked as nice as it did during the Austro-Hungarian empire.

My grandmother was originally from the Wachau, a picturesque region in the Danube valley where vineyards stretch across sunny terraced slopes. Her parents had been winegrowers and, as was the custom back then, my grandmother had to help out in the vineyards even at a very young age. She always spoke nostalgically of her childhood in the Wachau, made famous in Austria by the Hans Moser films from the 1950s, which romanticized the region as a dulcet idyll. In reality, her life in this panoramic landscape had mainly centred round work, work and more work. One day, on a ferry shuttling people to the other bank of the Danube, she met a baker from Spitz. She seized her opportunity to flee her predetermined life and married him. Ludwig Koch Senior was twenty-four years older than her, and it is difficult to imagine that love was the only motivation for her decision to marry. But as long as she lived she always spoke of her husband with great affection. I never got to know him, as he died shortly after I was born.

Even after all her years living in the city, my grandmother remained a rather eccentric country woman. She wore wool skirts and, over them, flowered aprons. She twisted her hair into curls and she smelled of a mixture of kitchen and
Franzbranntwein
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, which enveloped me whenever I pressed my face into her skirts. I even liked the slight odour of alcohol that surrounded her. As the daughter of winegrowers, she always drank a large glass of wine at every meal as if it were water, without ever showing any
signs of drunkenness. She remained true to her traditions, cooking meals on an old wood-fired stove and scouring her pots with an old-fashioned wire brush. She tended her flowers with particular devotion. Innumerable pots, pails and a long, old dough trough stood on exposed aggregate concrete slabs in the large courtyard behind her house, turning into islands of purple, yellow, white and pink blossoms every spring and summer. Apricots, cherries, plums and currants grew in the adjoining fruit orchard. The contrast between her house and our council estate at Rennbahnweg couldn’t have been greater.