Kitabı oku: «Just me», sayfa 2
The only joy that I could give him regarding sports was that, being the small little girl I have been, I learned very fast to ski particularly well. And that was at the early age of three. For a long time this would be the only area where I had an edge over the male members of my peer group, whom I quickly surpassed. However, I was probably not aware of the dangers involved.
For a long time I simply had the proverbial beginner's luck and therefore the exaggeratedly ambitious goals of my father never had negative consequences. Until one day when I was at the age of four, when the euphoria was clouded by an accident. I had raced downhill on a slope that was way too long and too steep for a child of my age and crashed after somersaulting about five times.
"Just don't tell Mom!" were the words of my father.
I didn't have to, because I became the talk of town for a week after my major crash. This did not, however, dampen my passion for snow and skiing, and that proved to be a major advantage later on.
I learned to swim even faster, practically within a few seconds. After a few timid and failed attempts on my part, my father dragged me up the diving platform and simply pushed me down from it and into the swimming pool, with the words: "Hey, look, a big fish!"
I can still remember this first involuntary diving attempt, the unique rushing of the water, the many oxygen bubbles and the unfamiliar feeling of weightlessness. I did, however, surface from the 'dive' unharmed and that was the end of my first swimming lesson.
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Right now, I was involuntarily stuck in a wet, cold hell again, and there would not be a way to escape it before the next morning, if there was one at all. When would they send an airplane to look out for me?
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Although my father, as the principal of a school, sort of had the afternoons off, and probably had the nerves to handle just about any situation, he simply couldn't manage his kids at home. However, my father was not the only one who was overwhelmed by the boyish girl I was, my six other siblings and all the financial worries our family was faced with; as one can imagine, it was, first and foremost, difficult for my mother. And I of all people – just imagine that – was supposed to constantly act as a watchdog for my brothers. I of all people was supposed to replace my mother's lacking assertiveness and ride herd over a bunch of wild boys.
So I was fighting a losing battle between my brothers and my parents. My sisters avoided me and my brothers beat me up whenever I wanted to play the 'educator'. And my parents scolded me because I was obviously incapable of maintaining order.
And when everything degenerated into chaos, we were quite literally beaten up by our mother. Yes, even I was, although it seldom was my fault. Sometimes the wooden stick that she used to beat us up broke, that's how fierce these attacks on our rear ends were!
Shortly before my birth my father's health problems started, and these were to put a strain on our family for decades.
In the years after my birth, the stork put six more kids in our nest, and we changed apartments three times in five years. Then my father had the glorious idea to turn his back on the Grail Valley with all its stubborn and obstinate old women. We moved to the 'Promised Land' of the Inn Valley. And we did this although my father's professional reputation was at its climax and he was very highly esteemed among the community of my birthplace; they even wanted to provide him with a house, if only he would stay in the village.
I call the old women stubborn and obstinate because they had often infuriated and stressed out the young school principal with their domineering and bitchy behavior and thus probably contributed to his illness, which later put such a strain on us.
Even though the town council praised him a great deal at that time, we turned our backs on my birthplace and moved into my father's parental house in Reutling.
That meant I was away from my beloved maternal grandfather but close to my father's mother, whom we kids had always avoided like the plague.
My younger brothers and I still feel nothing but rage when we think of her now, since she was the laziest, most egotistic and selfish woman I have ever met. Plus, her cooking skills provided us with culinary experiences replete with pain and horror.
When she prepared food for us, she actually dared to feed us kitchen scraps from her household. One of these items was the neck of the Sunday chicken, and we even fought over it.
I'm not so sure if the average citizen is aware of the amount of meat that is NOT on a chicken's neck. Even today, whenever my brother Werner has had too much beer, he often bawls: "If she were still alive, I would wring HER neck with my own bare hands."
°
"Hmm, yes, speaking of food, should I go ahead and have one of the seven granola bars that are in my emergency case?"
On such long, extensive voyages, I had always lashed an emergency kit to the dinghy. My tiny boat climbed to the top of a wave's crest, when I suddenly saw it: There was a white spot of light which rose up with the waves and then lowered again. I tried not to lose the faint light in front of my eyes as the boat sank down into a trough. Was that a fishing boat that was fighting this violent storm? It does not matter, whatever it was, I needed to make contact.
"They will not see me, how could they possibly see me?" As if I had seen it coming, I disappeared along with the dinghy in a wave.
Despite the heavy swell, lying on my back I managed to open the emergency kit. Carefully, I tried to keep it horizontal so that the precious content would not fall into the water. I had fastened the suitcase with a leash to my life vest.
Now I took one of the rescue flares, and immediately shut the case before it could get filled with water. Then I bit open the plastic film which should protect the rocket from moisture.
"So ... hold it with one hand and pull on the rope with the other. Damn, damn, shit!"
We had indeed practiced this in sailing school and before my first Atlantic crossing a dozens of times. I always grew bored of the practice. "What is this, it is kid stuff," I had thought.
And now, out of excitement, I almost shot myself and sunk along with my life jacket. So much for theory and practice.
"Breathe, deep, deep breaths," I was mumbling to myself.
I did not have many flares, and I was too hungry for life to shoot myself. So I tried to concentrate, this time with success. The next rocket rose hissing and howling against the night sky.
"Well, at least somebody can notice that there is still a person alive – if there is anyone in sight, that is."
Along with the boat I disappeared again in a wave.
"Damn it," I blurted. It did not matter anyway; no one could hear me out here.
When I came up again after what seemed like an eternity, the faint light was completely gone. My moment of euphoria soon died. My mood got as black as the seemingly bottomless sea beneath me. My situation was clear. It was as plain as the nose on your face class=st>. In this frightening darkness someone could easily miss me. The waves were now so unbelievably huge and were constantly breaking over me. It seemed too risky for me to open the case again. Maybe in the next few minutes the entire content could fall into the water, both emergency rockets, as well as granola bars. I needed to hold on just a little longer, to get out of this storm. I therefore abandoned the idea of using further signal rockets immediately. To tap into these energy reserves now would certainly be a waste. I also wanted to save the two cans of Red Bull I had left for as long as possible. Maybe this energy drink really could give me wings, in case no other help should appear. Dreaming is always an option. I wish I had had a can of Red Bull when I was a child.
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Even back then I was daydreaming about flying up to the church ceiling and not leaving all the miracles to Jesus. I wanted to fly to a place far away from my crazy life. A place where there would only be my true childlike self, where in my inner light I could find out who I really was.
Back in those days, I was probably as far away from having this dream fulfilled as I was right now.
The daily church services, which we were forced to attend, probably spoiled this institution for us forever.
My grandma sang, like so many of our relatives, in the church choir almost every day – which was one more reason that made me desire to fly away. We had to accompany her to Church every time but we did not take part in the singing.
Two of my brothers had been trained to be altar servers. Back then that was a very important thing for boys at their age, a task of significance and somewhat high value, so to speak.
Thank God this cup passed from me. At this time girls were not tolerated in the patriarchal world, even if they were as boyish as I was. I pouted; I wanted to fool around with the boys in the sacristy instead of having to sit in the pew with the boring good girls.
The move to Reutling and the culture shock that came along with it caused my already fragile self-confidence to suffer further hits below the belt. These included – apart from the linguistic shock that people in Reutling experienced when they are confronted with the almost incomprehensible dialect from the Grail Valley – cultural, culinary and financial shocks.
Due to the move and the building of a house, we had really become as poor as church mice. One could say that we slipped from a safe little place down into the slums. Just like one entire wall of the house 'slipped' or rather came down and plunged into the basement one day, next to my mother and me as we were boiling potatoes. That incident happened during the process of remodeling my grandparents' so-called 'witch house', which was what we called the former washhouse of my great-grandparents' farm.
In order to save time and money my uncle, who was the architect in charge, simply had not sufficiently supported and secured the wall of the old house. I am sure that this would make the headlines of the local newspaper if something similar happened today. And nowadays this is not so easy any more – at least not with something positive.
I had once again survived a near catastrophe. While us kids – I repeat: kids – were busy with the clean-up operations, my father was expected to play cards with my grandmother, which often happened when there was work to be done. My mother, I think, shed bathtubs full of tears on account of this ancient tyrant.
That's why the Grail Valley remained the idyllic homeland that had been taken from me for a very long time. My Grail Valley grandmother knew how to strongly support my predilection every time I visited.
My father had dared to take her daughter and therefore her family and her grandchildren away from her. And now I had to pay for it. She never really seemed to care too much for Jo and Werner, but everyone was of course taken with me as a girl amidst a crowd of madman. My brothers called me 'traitor' because of that.
During my stays in the Grail Valley I had to witness the outright hostility directed at my father, for, after all, he was the one who had committed the crime of fleeing the valley. Nowadays, I can totally understand him and accept it. But what could I have understood as an 8-year-old girl back then?
I can still perfectly remember a visit sometime between Christmas and New Year's. We were supposed to stay for two weeks, at least until Epiphany. My grandmother was happy and enjoyed bossing everyone around. My father went skiing with us to avoid her.
Quite unfortunately, it happened that my brother Werner broke his leg; so we had to curtail our vacation. That's when I got to know a different side of the grandmother I had loved so much until then. She pretty much knocked the stuffing out of seven-year-old Werner, who was lying in the family room with his broken leg and who was probably in horrible pain.
Slightly toned down, it sounded like this: "This moron boy just had to go and break his foot! You stupid jerk, now everybody has to go home because of you! I could kill you, you fool!"
And to top it all off, she banished the seven-year-old boy to the pantry as a punishment, despite his shock and severe pain.
After that, I didn't like spending my vacation at my grandma's place in the Grail Valley too much anymore. It had been my privilege up to that time. In the meantime I had found out why my grandfather, who actually really liked me a lot, did not appreciate my visits that much: It was because my grandmother always wanted me to sleep in their bedroom.
"It'd be way too scary for our poor little girl to spend the night all alone in another room!"
Well, I can't remember anything I would have been afraid of, but I didn't dare contradict the old shrew.
At some point I finally got it. That's how the frigid old woman could avoid any kinds of sexual advances from her husband, at least for two to three weeks. From a certain age on – I think even earlier – sex was only good for making babies anyway. " I can do without those crazy 3 minutes," I got to hear again and again , and not just from my grandma .
So the only "action" that took place in their bedroom was when the hens started to cackle wildly in the middle of the night and my grandpa, dressed in his nightgown and a sleeping cap – yes, really – and armed with a pistol from the nightstand, dashed out of the room to catch the fox. He never succeeded. On the following day, we kids followed the tracks of the fox using the feathers that the hen had lost. Well, this meant one less chicken for the soup. Given the choice, I wonder what the chicken would have preferred.
One can imagine that my surroundings – I'm talking about the Grail Valley women – were not exactly appropriate to provide a girl like me with role models for a modern, open and mature relationship. My erotic feelings, my Venus, where certainly not awakened in this environment.
However, these years provided me with other profound experiences. One of these days my uncle Franz had planned to go on a mountain hike with two German tourists. To escape my nagging aunts, I begged to be allowed to join the men at least for one day. My persistence was rewarded. I was invited to come along on the mountain tour.
Before the trip could start, I had had to fetch cigarettes for my uncle and the Germans, as I often did. Actually, I went to the nearby bar pretty much every day to do so. I still remember the brand, "HB". The man liked to call them "hanging breasts" for fun. Back then, I used to blush at the thought. However, I was willing to accept and ignore this kind of "humor" if it meant an opportunity to escape my grandmother's company, at least for some time.
We drove deep into the valley to the place where the road ended. From there, we went uphill on foot for quite a long time, heading for a place that offered a marvelous view of the mountain, the beautiful Schönbachler Horn. Although almost 3,000 meters high, this mountaintop could be reached with normal hiking boots, and without the usual equipment like rope, ice ax and crampons.
The view was fascinating, indeed overwhelming. We were surrounded by glacier flanks and huge ice fields below us. I was fascinated by the many crevasses in the ice.
During the last half hour of our descent, more and more heavy black clouds appeared in the sky above us. The mountain tops were shrouded in fog, and we decided to run the rest of the way. Having grown up in the mountains, one is accustomed to jump like a Capricorn over stones and rocks.
The path seemed endless to me. Once we had finally arrived at the car, I fell asleep as soon as I had taken my seat in the back. The three men started telling blonde jokes, and I was too young to have anything to contribute anyway. I also couldn't quite figure out what could possibly be so funny about these jokes at that time.
Suddenly, I woke up because of a deafening noise. "Now that drunkard has driven our car into the ravine!" was my first thought. And my second was, "I'm still alive!!" Even though my eyes had been closed before, I was blinded by the bright light that had accompanied the crashing sound.
The car reeked of sulfur. Our driver had brought it to a halt with great difficulty. Now I noticed the sudden downpour and lightning all around us. "Ooohhh holy shit... we have been struck by lightning! The car has jumped half a meter into the air!" yelled one of the men. Several minutes passed before anyone of us managed to answer him. I was completely speechless. I had been so rudely awakened that I was shaking like a leaf now.
The engine of the car was still running. At that time, the cars did not have all these built-in electronic systems that are standard with the ones of today, so we were able to continue our journey unhindered. The rest of the way, we went at an unusually low speed. Apart from that, we were all really quiet; my companions quite obviously didn't feel like telling stupid jokes anymore. "That's what happens if you make jokes about women," was the conclusion I drew at the time.
This experience influenced my behavior towards the male gender just as much as the women in my home environment.
Don't run women down and let them have their own opinions – that was the consequential message I got out of it at that time.
As soon as we arrived home, the three men chose to celebrate our survival (or maybe rather drown out the feeling of terror) with a lot of beer and liquor at the bar around the corner, the one where I had bought the "hanging breasts cigarettes". "Don't tell anything about this to the women," they had drummed into me before.
°
But let's get back to the Inn Valley, to Reutling, my father's favorite place, which was home to similar 'witches'.
My first experience with male creatures at my age must have left a deep and lasting mark on my subconscious, particularly with regards to dealing with the other sex and handling my career and my success.
My first childhood love and the first outburst of my untamable inner boldness culminated in a marriage proposal to my neighborhood playmate (we were both about 7 years old), which was promptly rejected with the following words:
"I'd never marry you, you're just the daughter of a poor school principal and my father is the village judge. I'm going to marry a female doctor someday!"
Looking back, I can say that I'm really happy that it all happened this way and that I didn't get married to this boy. Nevertheless, his words affected me deeply – and they really hurt. It was especially painful that I could not say anything about the incident at home as I did not want to upset my parents.
My self-confidence had plummeted to zero – or even below zero. And this was very soon reflected in my academic performance.
I have never been dumb, though. I can even remember myself wondering why the teacher kept explaining things over and over again, sometimes even up to five times although everyone had already fully comprehended the topic – or, maybe that was not the case for everyone…?
Back then, nobody had explained to me that you have to 'internalize' the material you comprehended. That's why, or so I've come to believe, I slept through two thirds of my school years. During the other third I was constantly brawling and fighting with the boys at my age, so I could not concentrate on school and failed in showing my potential.
At the beginning I had a very nice teacher . She protected the unusual girl that I was and accepted the wild creature, the witch in me. She was a very caring and attentive person. I loved her for that. It was especially useful for me that we had the same way to school. Today her role would be called 'bodyguard'. On my way home I would cling to her coat-tails, or her hand, so I would be safe from my classmates' attacks. Obviously, I couldn't count on my crabby girly 'friends' to help me, and even though I was a tomboy I was simply too weak to defend myself against the overly powerful boys.
That's why my first three years of school were somewhat bearable. After her came Coughie, also known as Smokie. He was a chain-smoking giant who was constantly tormented by coughing, or rather choking fits, and who had to prevent himself from suffocating during one third of the lesson and smoked one cigarette after another during the other two thirds.
As a teacher, Smokie was as out of place as a dolphin in the desert. And what was even worse: I had also lost my guardian angel for my way home from school.
At any rate, Smokie found out that I was dyslexic, and thus an absolute failure when it came to spelling. No one knew much about this problem; let alone how to overcome it.
The only positive thing I remember from this time at school was the following statement from Smokie: "Her essays are sensational, she's going to be a writer someday, but she needs a secretary with good spelling skills."
Well, if only he had known that nowadays all you need is a good laptop and a word processing software tool with a spell-check function.
That would have spared me some painful days back then. And so it happened that, even though I was classified as a quite intelligent student, they said:
"With these spelling problems we can't send her to high school, not with all the will in the world."
I could see how disappointed my father was. All of my life I had dreamt about writing books about true love and passion, and about gaining experience and the wisdom and knowledge acquired throughout the years.
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It will probably come to nothing, I thought, being thrown back and forth by the waves as the raging storm reached its peak. I was so terribly tired, and wanted to sleep, but I was afraid I wouldn't wake up again if I allowed myself to doze off.
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During my school days I did not care about it at all. I slept through most of the hours in class. For me, they were just too boring, and this was reluctantly accepted by my parents.
Besides that, my parents didn't have the money to send two of their seven children to an institution of higher learning. Hence, my problems at school were a welcome excuse. I gave up, only did the bare minimum, and not even that. One can imagine that I delivered a remarkably bad performance for the daughter of a principal.
While my father was bitterly disappointed, my mother coddled me. These weren't quite the greatest circumstances as one can imagine. My classmates started teasing me more and more.
"Once your self-confidence is at zero, your environment will do the rest."
I can remember that, after a time when I was suffering from a fracture of my lower leg ( back then we had ski bindings made of metal spirals), I repeatedly faked pain. My ancient skis with their flat or barely rounded tips had sealed my fate and I had had another horrible skiing accident.
My equipment was simply not suitable for this. I wore a cast for the usual period of time and found out that because of this I got much more attention than usual, and my brothers and classmates took care of me. My cast was littered with autographs of male 'fans'. My mother, and thus the doctor, had to respond to my fake pain. The result was that I had to wear a cast for eight weeks during a growth spurt.
Today, a shortened lower leg and a twisted spine bear witness to the medical ignorance of our family doctor back then.
Was it my own fault? Was it fate? What had all this been good for?
Furthermore, my mother succeeded in keeping me away from all the activities intended for adolescent males, which I would have loved to take part in them. She would neither let me play football with my male peers, nor was I allowed to join the Youth Alpine Club.
A supposed heart deficiency served her as an appropriate explanation – after all I was genetically her daughter and she preferred to keep me out of harm's way by all means.
By the time I was ten, I had beaten everyone at skiing, even people who later became big names in the Austrian National Team. They even wanted to promote and financially support me, the 'wildcat', and my brothers in a team as our family wouldn't have had the money for these extra expenses.
A local delegation came to us with such an offer, but my mother chased them out of the house. And not just once!
In hindsight, this is, despite everything, somehow understandable, since my father had once crashed his motorcycle against a tree in a race. Remember also that there were only leather helmets at the time. Afterwards he lay unconscious in the adjacent field, with a basilar skull fracture. A friend saved his life on the spot by getting the coagulated blood out of my father's throat with his bare fingers. Otherwise my father would quite probably have suffocated on his own blood!
He finally got to the hospital (back then there was no emergency rescue system in this place) and was in a coma for ten days, more dead than alive. The whole valley, and especially the doctors, called it a medical miracle that he had survived this accident in the first place.
If you consider how much luck you need to survive such a terrible accident even today, it really was a miracle that our father could actually walk out of the hospital on his own two feet afterwards.
Our family and especially we kids, however, suffered from the long-term effects of this accident for decades.
I was really good at skiing but my mother denied me even that because of my father's accident. You know, you can crash into a tree when you're on skis, too, not just on a motorcycle.
This hardly helped improve my reputation among my classmates, as one can imagine. Even back in school there was a certain 'hierarchy.'
So my mother successfully prevented me from participating in all extra-curricular events like skiing trips, nature camps or various other trips which would have been necessary for my socialization process.
And that's why I wasn't invited to take part in any pubescent learning processes about sex. It was my overprotective mother's fault that I had simply never been there in any of the crucial moments. Thus, my classmates made their first experiences with masturbation and other erotic games without Rebecca . Since one heard all kinds of things after the weeklong school-sponsored skiing trip or the stay in a youth hostel during the weeklong excursion to Vienna, I knew that almost all of the girls had put their hands between the legs of each other. These were all just harmless girls' games, after all.
But since I had never been part of this and the others were curious as to whether I was really a girl or maybe a boy after all, four of my classmates were waiting for me in the equipment room one day, and before I knew what they were up to, they had already pulled down my skirt.
I can still remember that I was torn between indignation and crying, between sensing impertinence, protest and… maybe they were interested in me after all… a certain sexual pleasure.
Being a good little girl, I had to feign indignation, but I wouldn't have rejected it if some girl had wanted to 'lend me a hand', or maybe even her tongue, as well. Just like classmates granting favors to each other.
Therefore, I didn't make much of an effort to fight them off. And when, in the (on my part) faked heat of the moment, the nicest of my classmates slipped her fingers inside me, my restraint was finally gone completely .
"Aaaah"… Somehow it felt good to have been accepted into the circle of the 'feminists'.
Are you shocked now, dear reader? It was quite normal for girls at that time and actually harmless. It was probably the same for boys.
I had secretly watched my brothers as they mutually pleasured themselves and rubbed their dicks until something spurted out many times. It was particularly interesting for me when my brothers announced the motto: "Who squirts the most?" Again and again, I sneaked up to them to attend these male ejaculation games. One had always heard the most amazing stories about such erotic games from various convent schools or boarding colleges, and not only in certain corresponding films.
In the afternoons at home, my brothers would proudly present me, the sister, to their friends. I already had quite womanly curves at the appropriate parts of my body for my age.
This was considered a sensation among the other guys in my clique, who were two to three years younger. For me, this was one of the few highlights in those days.
Girls who dared to play around with boys without inhibitions and shyness were pretty rare. And the fact that there was a hole instead of a dick under the already burgeoning pubic hair caught the boys' interest for a few weeks, months, even years. Later, the guys invented a game in which they lined up with me and two of my less bitchy cousins in a circle. The leader gave the command: "One, two, three, pants down... one, two, three hands on... one, two, three start masturbating!" We girls had nothing to take into our hands, so we could just slip our fingers into our pussies and move our hands back and forth like the guys did. This proved to be extremely boring in comparison to having a cock in our hands, so we girls begged to be allowed to pleasure them. After some time I was so well-integrated into the group that they would let me massage one of their dicks more and more often. I simply loved it and it was one of my daily highlights during this period. It was not until much later that I found it awesome when one of the guys put a turnip, banana, cucumber or something similar into my vagina. That was all we dared for the moment, and I felt like it at least once a day.
