3,096 Days (3 page)

During the first years of my life, my grandmother was the epitome of ‘home’ for me. I often spent the night at her house, allowed her to spoil me with chocolate and cuddled up with her on her old couch. In the afternoons, I would visit a friend of mine in the village whose parents had a small swimming pool in their garden. I rode my bike through the village with the other children living on the streets and explored with curiosity an environment where I was free to wander as I pleased. My parents had opened a shop nearby and I sometimes rode my bike the short distance to my grandmother’s house to surprise her with a visit. I still remember that she would often be sitting under the hairdryer, which drowned out the doorbell and my knocking. Then I would climb over the fence, sneak up to her from behind and have great fun startling her. She would laugh and shoo me through the kitchen with curlers still in her hair – ‘Just you wait till I get my hands on you!’ – and sentence me to work in the garden as ‘punishment’. I loved picking dark red cherries with her off the tree or snapping the over-full branches of currants carefully from the bushes.

My grandmother not only provided me with a small slice of a carefree and loving childhood, but I also learned from her how to create space for feelings in a world that did not allow emotions to come to the surface. On my visits, I accompanied her nearly daily to a small cemetery a little outside the village, surrounded by a
wide-open field. My grandfather’s grave, with its shiny black tombstone, was located all the way at the back along a newly created gravel pathway near the cemetery wall. During the summer the sun beats down on the graves, and except for the occasional passing car along the main street, the only thing you can hear is the humming of the crickets and the flocks of birds flying above the fields. My grandmother would place fresh flowers on the grave, crying softly to herself. When I was small, I always tried to comfort her, saying, ‘Don’t cry, Grandma – Grandpa wants to see you smile!’ Later, when I was old enough to go to primary school, I understood that the women in my family, unwilling to show any weakness in their daily lives, needed a place where they could let their emotions run free. A protected place that belonged only to them.

When I was older, the afternoons spent with my grandmother’s friends, who often joined us in visiting the cemetery, began to bore me. Though I had once loved being fed cakes and asked questions by old ladies about anything and everything, I had now reached the age when I simply had no more desire to sit in old-fashioned living rooms full of dark furniture and lace doilies, where you were not allowed to touch anything, while the ladies bragged about their grandchildren. At the time, my grandmother felt insulted when I ‘turned away from her’. ‘I’ll just go and find myself another granddaughter,’ she informed me one day. I was deeply hurt when she actually began to give ice cream and sweets to another, smaller, girl who came into her shop regularly.

Although that disagreement was soon cleared up, from then on my visits to Süssenbrunn grew less frequent. My mother had an uneasy relationship with her mother-in-law anyway, so it was not inconvenient for her that I was no longer to spend the night there so often. But even though the relationship became less close when I began primary school, as is the case with most grandmothers and grandchildren, she always remained my touchstone.
For she gave me the sense of safety and security that I lacked at home.

Three years before I was born, my parents opened a small grocery with a
Stüberl
, an adjoining café, in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung council estate, about fifteen minutes by car from Rennbahnweg. In 1988, they took over yet another grocery located on Pröbstlgasse in Süssenbrunn, situated on the main road running through the village and just a few hundred metres from my grandmother’s house. In a single-storey, antique pink corner house with an old-fashioned door and a shop counter from the 1960s, they sold baked goods, ready-to-eat foods, newspapers and special magazines for lorry drivers, who made their final stop here on this arterial road on the outskirts of Vienna. The shelves were stocked with the small things required for everyday life that people still bought from the corner grocery even though they now had access to the local supermarket: small cardboard packages with laundry detergent, noodles, instant soups and, most of all, sweets. An old cold storehouse painted pink stood in the small back courtyard.

These two shops later became the central pillars of my childhood, in addition to my grandmother’s house. I spent countless afternoons after kindergarten or school at the shop in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung while my mother balanced the accounts or waited on customers. I played hide-and-seek with the other children or rolled down the small sledding hill the municipality had made. The council estate was smaller and quieter than ours; I was free to explore as I pleased and found it easy to make friends. From the shop I was able to observe the customers in the café: housewives, men coming home from work, and others who began drinking beer even in the late morning, ordering a grilled cheese sandwich to go with it. Such shops were slowly disappearing from the cities and, with their longer opening hours, the serving of alcohol and
their personal atmosphere, my parents’ shops filled an important niche for many people.

My father was responsible for the bakery and for delivering the baked goods, while my mother took care of everything else. When I was about five years old, he began to take me with him on his delivery rounds. We drove in the van through the rambling suburbs and villages, stopping in restaurants, bars and cafés, at hotdog stands and in smaller shops as well. For that reason I probably became better acquainted with the area north of the Danube than any other kid my age – and spent more time in bars and cafés than was perhaps appropriate. I enjoyed spending so much time with my father immensely and felt like I was very grown up and being taken seriously. But our delivery rounds had their downside as well.

‘What a sweet girl!’ I probably heard that a thousand times. I don’t have pleasant memories of it, although I was on the receiving end of compliments and the centre of attention. The people who pinched my cheeks and bought me chocolate were unfamiliar. Besides, I hated being pushed into a spotlight that I had not sought out myself. It left in me only a deep-seated feeling of embarrassment.

My father was a jovial man who loved to make a grand entrance. His little daughter in her freshly pressed dresses was the perfect accessory and he enjoyed showing me off to his customers. He had friends everywhere – so many that even as a child I recognized that not all of these people could really be close to him. Most of them let him buy them a drink, or borrowed money from him. In an effort to fulfil his need for approval, he was happy to pay.

I sat on barstools in these smoky pubs and listened to grown-ups whose interest in me quickly dissipated. A large number of them were unemployed and had failed at life, spending their days drinking beer and wine and playing cards. Many of them had
had a profession at one time, had been teachers or civil servants, and had just fallen through the cracks of life. Today we call that ‘burnout syndrome’. Back then this was part of the normal fabric of life on the outskirts of the big city.

Only rarely did someone ask me what I was doing in these places. Most of them just took it for granted and were friendly to me in an exaggerated way. ‘My big girl,’ said my father approvingly, patting my cheek with his hand. When someone bought me sweets or a soft drink, payment in kind was expected in return: ‘Give Uncle So-and-So a kiss. Give Aunty here one too.’ I resisted such close contact with strangers, who I resented for stealing my father’s attention, attention that was supposed to be mine. These delivery rounds were a constant emotional roller-coaster: one moment I was the centre of attention, presented to the group and given a sweet, while the next I was ignored so completely that I could have been run over by a car and it not be noticed. This fluctuation between attention and neglect in a world of superficial interactions chipped away at my self-esteem. I learned to play-act my way to the centre of attention and keep myself there for as long as possible. Only nowadays have I begun to understand that this attraction I have for the stage, the dream of acting that I had nurtured from my earliest days, did not come from within me. It was my way of imitating my extrovert parents – and a way to survive in a world in which you were either admired or ignored.

Just a little while later, this roller-coaster ride of attention and neglect began to extend to my closest environment. The world of my early childhood slowly began to crack. At first, only small cracks appeared, barely noticeable in the familiarity of my surroundings so that I still took little notice of them, blaming myself as the cause of all the discord. But then the cracks grew bigger until our entire family structure imploded. My father realized
much too late that he had pushed things a little too far and that my mother had already long made up her mind to leave him. He continued to behave extravagantly, like a king of the urban fringe area, who went from bar to bar and bought himself large expensive cars time and again. The Mercedes or Cadillacs were meant to impress his ‘friends’. He borrowed the money to buy them. Whenever he gave me a small allowance, he would borrow it right back again to buy cigarettes or to go out for coffee. He took out so many loans on my grandmother’s house that it was seized as payment. By the mid 1990s he had accumulated so much debt that it endangered the existence of our family. In the process of his debt-restructuring, my mother took over the grocery in Süssenbrunn and the shop in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung. But the cracks went far beyond finances. At some point my mother had just had enough of a man who liked to party, but who had no idea of the meaning of dependability.

The gradual separation of my parents changed my entire life. Instead of being pampered and spoilt, I got left by the wayside. My parents spent hours arguing loudly. They took turns locking themselves in the bedroom, while the other would continue to shout in the living room. When I timidly tried to ask what was going on, they put me in my room, closed the door and continued fighting. I felt caged up in there and didn’t know what the world was coming to. I buried my head in my pillow to try to shut out the loud rows and transport myself back to my earlier, carefree childhood. Only rarely was I able to do this. I simply could not understand why my once beaming father now seemed helpless and lost, unable to produce little surprises from his sleeve as if by magic to cheer me up. His inexhaustible supply of gummi bears seemed to have suddenly dried up.

After one heated quarrel, my mother even left the flat, not returning for several days. She wanted to show my father how it felt to have no idea where your partner was. For him, one or two
nights away from home was nothing unusual. But I was much too young to understand her ulterior motives, and I was afraid. At that age you have a different sense of time and my mother’s absence seemed interminable to me. I had no idea whether she would ever come back at all. The feeling of abandonment, of being rejected, became deep-seated within me. A phase of my childhood began in which I was no longer able to find my place, in which I no longer felt loved. The small, self-assured person I had been was gradually transformed into an insecure girl who ceased to trust the people closest to her.

It was during these difficult times that I started pre-school, or
Kindergarten
as we call it. This was a moment when other people’s control over my life, which I had such difficulty coping with as a child, reached a high point.

My mother had registered me at a private pre-school close to where we lived. From the very beginning I felt misunderstood and so unaccepted that I began to hate pre-school. The very first day I experienced something that laid the cornerstone for these feelings. I was outside with the other children in the garden and I discovered a tulip that held great fascination for me. I bent over the flower, pulling it carefully towards me with my hand in order to take a sniff. The teacher must have thought that I was about to pick the flower. With one sharp movement, she slapped the back of my hand. I called out indignantly, ‘I’m going to tell my mother!’ However, that evening I was forced to realize that now she had delegated authority over me to someone else, my mother was no longer on my side. When I told her about the incident, convinced that she would defend me in solidarity and admonish the teacher the very next day, she merely said that that was the way things were in school, that you had to follow the rules. And, moreover, ‘I’m just not going to get involved, because I wasn’t even there to see it.’ This statement became her standard answer when I came
to her with problems I had with the pre-school teachers. And whenever I told her about bullying by the other kids, she merely said, ‘Then you just have to hit back.’ I had to learn to overcome difficulties by myself. The time I spent in pre-school was a tough period in my life. I hated the strict rules. I rebelled at having to lie down after lunch with the other kids in the nap room although I wasn’t at all tired. The teachers went about their daily routines without expressing any particular interest in us. While they kept one eye on us, they read novels and magazines with the other, gossiping and painting their fingernails.

I was only able to make friends with the other children very slowly, and though surrounded by kids the same age I felt lonelier than before.

Risk factors, primarily with secondary enuresis, are links to a sense of loss in the broadest sense, such as parents’ splitting up, divorce, death, the birth of a sibling, extreme poverty, delinquency on the part of parents, deprivation, neglect, a lack of support for developmental milestones.

This is the dictionary definition for the causes of the problem I was forced to deal with during that time. I went from being a precocious child, who had quickly been able to do without nappies, to a bed-wetter. Bed-wetting became a stigma that blighted my life. The wet patches in my bed every night were the source of never-ending scolding and ridicule.