"On the Bridge" Tania Maliarchuk

Austria is the best country to escape one’s self. It doesn’t meddle with your guilt, it doesn’t want to domesticate you or soothe your fear of forgetting your native language.

In April 2018, I wrote a short story titled „Frogs in the Sea” that won a prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt. It was the first short story I ever wrote a) about frogs and b) in German. Ingeborg Bachmann is my favourite writer. The language she uses is majestic, mysterious, and poignant, not unlike a volcanic island full of exotic animals and fruit, its shores strewn with shells and skeletons. Wanderers such as myself have no hope of ever getting to such an island. Just setting out to look for it was an act of extraordinary impudence.

***

When I came to Vienna, the year was 2011. Back then, all I could say in German was Guten Tag and Hände hoch. My dad liked to say “handhe hoh” whenever he caught someone red-handed, say, nibbling on potato pancakes or apple pie in the kitchen in the middle of the night. He picked up this phrase from a popular Soviet TV series about World War II. After we moved, Dad sometimes asked me whether the Austrian language is very different from German or just a little. Meanwhile in Austria, nobody knew anything meaningful about Ukraine. More times than I cared to count, I had to explain the difference between Russian and Ukrainian languages while insisting they are not the same. One time, a taxi driver asked me where I come from and upon hearing Ukraine, he exclaimed: “America? Africa? Asia?” It was beyond his imagination that a country with such a name could possibly exist on his own continent.

My decision to emigrate was not a long-pondered one. I was twenty-seven and led by simple curiosity. Once I came back to my senses, permanent residence permit already in hand, I decided to become a bridge-builder. It most certainly seems to be my life’s mission to flail between two cultures while creating new neural pathways. The metaphor of a bridge came up after the Klagenfurt victory I mentioned before. The journalists were eager to establish how I manage to reconcile two homelands, is it possible at all, in which language do I think, dream and swear, do I miss Ukraine, does Ukraine miss me? I had to save myself, somehow. I live on a bridge, I said, and sometimes, I find myself underneath one. To the left, there is where I came from and what I have lost, and to the right – everything I have already got to know well but will never own for myself. Is it easy to write in a foreign language? No, but a handful of verbs and a little bitterness are enough to make for a good story.

***

At school, I hated German. It was introduced as a non-compulsory language for a year or two. German phonetics felt like it was breaking my tongue into pieces, and the grammar was doing the same to my brain. The teacher, whose name I fail to recall, once listened to a painfully assembled sentence I somehow managed to utter and noted that my efforts to speak German sound not unlike the Japanese struggling to use English. I still don’t know whether she was joking or serious. And why the Japanese? Their English is no better and no worse than that of any other nation. And everyone, regardless of their provenience, can sound ridiculous as soon as they cross the border. In foreign languages, we are all clowns.

I made a promise to myself I would never learn German again, and that I would forget its very existence. For a while, I managed to keep my promise. I had a serious job as a journalist in Kyiv and wrote my little books about quirky people looking for love. In fact, everything I write is about people craving love. This craving is insatiable, and the love turns out to be impossible. One time, I was conducting a live interview when I forgot the name and occupation of my guest. I got stuck and just remained silent while the clock ticked. The red camera light was blinking threateningly, counting the minutes of my horrible blunder. Finally, a confused serious journalist gave the microphone to the guest and she asked him to introduce himself. How many people saw that programme? Ten thousand? Twenty? And the reruns went on for two more days afterwards.

The author meeting in Klagenfurt also went live in a studio, with two hundred thousand watching. That’s roughly the same as the population of Ivano-Frankivsk, the town where I was born. The red camera light was blinking threateningly, I walked onto the stage and smiled, having no right to warn anyone I was about to make a colossal embarrassment of myself. No matter – it wasn’t my first time. “Guten Tag,” I said loudly (“handhe hoh,” I added in my mind) and began reading my short story about frogs (which was really about myself) with my awful Slavic accent and my profoundly un-German singsong intonation. All the while, I was secretly surprised to see the ghosts of various writers, from Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Georg Trakl to Ernst Jandl and Thomas Bernhard chose not to intervene and make me drop dead on my way to the dais. I could imagine Bernhard’s snide comments. One time, when Bernhard was still alive, a journalist from „Der Spiegel” asked him why he loathes other writers so much. “Just the fact that they write, too, is a reason enough,” answered the writer, and I must admit there was some logic to it.

***

Thomas Bernhard was buried in Vienna’s Grinzing Cemetery. In 1989, a hundred days before his death, his play „Heroes Square” caused a scandal that never quite faded. So how is it, really – are Austrians the first victims of Nazi Germany or its loyal subjects? Who among the thousands crowded in the Heroes Square hailed Hitler beneath the windows of today’s national library? Bernhard’s verdict is as jeering as it is ruthless. Not that he could be accused of much love towards anything, least of all his homeland. He liked to say that every other Austrian is a Catholic, and every third a Nazi. That Nazis would always choose the nicest spots. That Vienna is a meat grinder ready to pulverise any talent. That a writer can only expect appreciation from six feet under. That the German language kills everything light and beautiful.

Bernhard’s grave was plundered twice. I visited it many times.

***

Wait a minute, you might say, what did you mean when you said that „Frogs in the Sea” are about you? Why frogs? Why in the sea?

I should be brief, so here’s how the story goes. The main character is an illegal Ukrainian immigrant named Petro. He destroyed his passport so that in the case of a slip-up the police cannot identify and deport him. Petro’s greatest victory was leaving Ukraine, and to return would be his greatest defeat. Standing on a bridge on the Danube, Petro tore his passport into tiny pieces he threw into the water, and to be sure, he ate the photo page.

Then many years pass by fast, as they do in life that runs through one’s fingers. Petro works illegally, drinks cheap wine and meets people – it’s not certain whether they are mad, or just unhappy. The excluded feel sorry for each other. The excluded save each other. Some want to know whether the frogs live in the sea. To avoid any anxiety around the matter, I shall now ascertain that they do not, so let’s now move on. Petro, of course, does eventually end up in the hands of law enforcement. A menacing policeman sternly demands his ID. Here, I must admit, I did make some allowances: in reality, Austrian police is among the most tolerant on the planet. If you fall asleep drunk on a public lawn, they will wake you up gently and suggest you lay on your jacket because the grass is damp from yesterday’s rain. But Petro is crushed. He knows this is the end. No matter how long and far he runs, no matter how thoroughly burnt his bridges, sooner or later, he will have to confront himself. Does he suffer when finally caught, or maybe the opposite – rejoices in the moment? Does he feel like a fool or like a hero? “Your passport, please!” demands the policeman, and Petro – in a scene I relish to this day – mutters simply: “I ate it.”

***

Austria is the best country to escape one’s self. It doesn’t meddle with your guilt, it doesn’t want to domesticate you or soothe your fear of forgetting your native language. In German, there isn’t even an equivalent for the Ukrainian word ridnyy, a word of many meanings: native, kin, of similar customs and opinions or coming from the same place – and on top of that, it’s also an expression of tenderness. My Austrian translator Maria asked me many times not to use that word again. “Try saying it differently,” she insisted. But what other word can I use to describe: my own mother, homeland smells, the landscapes of my childhood? What other word could describe the familiarity of all those things? And at the same time, it was in Austria that I stopped giggling nervously when asked about my occupation and started saying: I’m a writer. I even have business cards to follow. It was in Austria I wrote two novels and am finishing my third. Here, I learned to ride a bike, hem fabrics on my sewing machine, play the guitar. Still, Austria will never refer to me as the Austrian writer Tania Maliarchuk. And for that, I am grateful.

Austria will just let me be for a while and disappear.

***

That summer, a man was living under a bridge not far from my home. There aren’t many homeless people living in Vienna so I found the sight of him genuinely moving. Every day, I ran past him during my morning jog, and he always greeted me with a friendly nod while stretching his purple bedsheet on blackberry bushes to air it. The spears of Habsburg Gothic loomed on the horizon. The man built himself a proper bed on a park bench, stabilising bench legs with stones so that the structure wouldn’t slide into the murky waters of the Danube. He even somehow managed to get a single mattress and a little broom he used to brush litter and cigarette butts into a neat pile. Day by day, he feathered his nest with more attributes of luxury. First, I saw a mobile phone, then shaving razors, Thermos flasks, and a bicycle from the iconic Austrian brand Puch. Then, I couldn’t help myself any longer and stopped to chat with him. I asked him in English: Where is he from, why is he living under the bridge, where is his family. The homeless man looked about fifty, wasn’t grey-haired yet, and was well dressed, mainly in sweats. He started to explain in an emotional tone, tears glistening in his eyes, but the only word in his monologue I managed to catch was “Romania”. Perhaps I couldn’t be bothered to listen harder. I didn’t ask any more questions. Just gave him ten euros and resumed my run, fantasising about his story for a little longer. Then I went for a two-week holiday in the mountains, and when I came back in early September, the man was gone. His bench stood by the path in its usual place. Everything around was as clean as a whistle. The Danube kept on going east. Blackberries were in plenty, their leaves already yellowed.

***

When someone departs he must throw his hat,
filled with the mussels he spent the summer
gathering, in the sea
and sail off with his hair in the wind,
he must hurl the table,
set for his love, in the sea,
he must pour the wine,
left in his glass, into the sea,
he must give his bread to the fish
and mix a drop of his blood with the sea,
he must drive his knife deep into the waves
and sink his shoes,
heart, anchor and cross,
and sail off with his hair in the wind.
Then he will return.
When?
Do not ask.

Ingeborg Bachmann

Translated from the Polish by Aga Zano

Tania Maliarchuk – ukrainian writer, essayist and journalist. Author of eight books. For the novel “A Biography of a Chance Miracle”, she was awarded the BBC award in the competition for the best Ukrainian book of the year and a nomination for the Angelus Central European Literary Award. Moreover, a laureate of Crystal Vilenica (2013), Literary Award of Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski (2013) and Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis (2018). She lives in Vienna.