Lost Years
This story is based on a true event.
Andreas is sitting on a park bench outside the hospital in Wangen, too weak to stand up. It is February, cold air fills his lungs, which feel as if they are filled with needles. The stitches remind him that he is still alive. His hands, sinewy and covered with blotchy skin, tremble. He muses about getting older, his steady decline, of which he is tired and weary. Since his wife died four months ago, things have been going downhill for him.
Although he has known for a year that he has cancer, he has so far been spared any major effects. A rare form of leukemia has affected his body, preventing the red blood cells from transporting oxygen through his body. His prospects are depressing, at some point he will no longer be able to breathe and will suffocate. He was already unable to breathe freely before his hospitalization because there was too much water in his lungs. The doctors could have given him blood transfusions if he had been suitable. His blood values were not life-threatening enough, although he had collapsed a few hours earlier due to a lack of oxygen at the bakery. The doctors wanted to keep him in hospital, but he refused. Andreas wants to get back to his apartment as soon as possible. He signed a waiver stating that he was responsible for his own discharge and left the building amid admonishing words from the doctors and nurses.
Now he sits on this bench and looks out into the misty, cool afternoon. Until shortly after his wife's death, no one in his family knew about the cancer, neither his two sons, nor his grandchildren, sister or friends, who have become fewer and fewer over the years. Until a few months ago, caring for his wife with dementia kept him alive, but since she died, he has felt empty and useless. Shortly after she moved into the nursing home, he used to keep her company at dinner. Every day he was by her side, every day he proved that he loved her and did not accept that her spirit was gradually disappearing. He continued to visit her every day even after she stopped registering his presence five years ago.
Andreas remembers how they met. Her family and his were indirectly related, his mother was a cousin of her father. This was something he never liked to admit. Legally, it wasn't a problem, but he was still uncomfortable about what other people might think of him. It was not unusual in the western Allgäu to marry off relatives who were many times closer to you.
He tries to remember back. He was twenty-three, she was twenty. She was visiting his family at the time, together with her mother, because he had brought them a basket of apples three days earlier. When he stood on her doorstep in Scheidegg and put the apples in her mother's hand, he only saw her out of the corner of his eye, indeed, he didn't really notice her at all. Now, when he saw her in her full form, his heart skipped a beat. It was an indescribable feeling that he didn't want to experience again so soon, as he had just got out of a relationship. Elfriede, Elfchen, or Elfi, as he later called her, triggered these feelings, this tingling in his stomach that spread throughout his whole body. Elfi, with her short, dark brown hair, a slender yet strong little body and a sternness in her expression that told him she was up to anything. When she sat opposite him in the living room, looking so smart in her brown skirt and white blouse, he liked her so much that they arranged to go hiking together at the weekend. He, his sister, a friend and Elfi.
After they stood on the summit of the mountain and looked down into the valley, he intuitively knew that she was the one for him. He can still see her standing there at the summit cross, in an upright position, gazing into the distance. If his sister and her friend complained about the climb he had chosen, Elfi didn't say a word about it and ran up the mountain with him. That evening they went dancing and the warm feeling in his stomach intensified. A feeling that was still in its infancy at the time, but would last a lifetime. The evening of dancing was a great pleasure. The same stamina she showed when climbing mountains was now also evident when dancing. They became closer, he was able to touch her in a socially acceptable setting, twirl her around and laugh with her. And so it was that they soon became a couple.
Back then, over sixty years ago, he was still living at home, sleeping in a room with his two brothers, which made it difficult to find a place just for the two of them. They knew they would have to wait to get together. On the one hand it made him sad, on the other he was looking forward to a life with her. To a child that he named "Putzele" for himself and that she owed him without ever asking. He wanted to marry her and assumed that it was also her greatest wish to have a child together. Until now, they had only had their hikes, on which they kissed when they reached their respective peaks and said how much they liked each other. At the time, it seemed impossible for him not to have her with him, but the day came in the spring of 1960 when they involuntarily underwent a physical separation. His Elfi was sent by her company to Bolzano in South Tyrol for two months. She was to help set up a branch abroad for her workplace, the bridal fashion manufacturer Achberger. For Andreas, this was the worst time he had ever had to live through in his younger years. At first he tried to talk Elfi out of it, but as her boss insisted and everything was already organized, he had no choice but to accept it. On the day she left him, he accompanied her to the train station in Bregenz and felt as if a piece of flesh had been torn from his body. Fears that he had seen her for the last time crept in and poisoned the farewell. In his head, he heard the words in an endless loop: "My boss said that if I do well, maybe we can start a new life in Bolzano, that would be something. A life just for us." She was full of anticipation. He was full of fear because his roots were here. Fear because he couldn't stand Italians. Everything foreign and different aroused a skepticism in him that made him freeze.
Andreas was born on February 28, 1937 and was eight years old when the Second World War ended. Fifteen years later, the war was already so long ago that only remaining war veterans, missing a leg or arm, revealed the last obvious traces of war. Not much had happened in this remote corner of the country. No deliberate bombings, just two accidental hits: one near their farm, the other in a bog in a neighboring town. No battles, no serious famines. Andreas, still a child, did not understand the impact of this war when the Allies defeated Germany and thus ended the war. He was too young to understand the atrocities and consequences of the - to put it mildly - misguided assumptions of National Socialist ideology. He could only watch as his family and the surrounding farms had to supply their French occupiers with food after the end of the war and suffered more than during the war.
Despite the horror of a war that the majority of people in this area did not have to fight and not questioning the abstruse sense of the Nazis' views, people quietly held on to their xenophobic, Nazi-ideology oriented beliefs. It was as if they had been indoctrinated with them for so long that nothing else made sense to them. An invisible brand that almost every one of them bore. Andrea's brand was so deep that he refused to leave his familiar surroundings despite the economic boom and the unimagined opportunities that were available to them. He wanted nothing to change, everything to move in an easy-to-understand construct that he and his fellow men established at the time and which still has a place in many people's minds to this day.
When Elfi was away, Andreas wrote letters to her as often as he could. She replied to each one immediately. At least three times a week, two pages or more. They were at their most in love at this time and he was also most afraid of losing her. That's why he wrote to her that she couldn't go so far away anymore, which displeased her. She was already looking forward to a future in another country that offered her more prospects than her home country.
He still occasionally reads the letters he sent her back then. He would love to read Elfi's letters to him again, but she destroyed them years ago in her emerging dementia. Andreas doesn't know whether it was because of her dementia or whether it was the paralyzing feeling of regret at the memory of another life that prompted her to do so. Elfi could have stayed in Bolzano back then and Andreas would have been taken care of: a job as a mechanic in a workshop, a furnished apartment. Andreas bitterly refused. He would never have left the bosom of his family and home. Elfi's place was here too, she just didn't know it at the time.
His sister Frieda agreed. "What are you doing there? You belong here. And above all, how dare you question that?" Frieda was like a shadow following him and a protective guiding hand over him and the rest of the family. She was the eldest of four children: Andreas, the youngest. He had two brothers who have since died. Frieda took it upon herself, given her status in the family, to constantly interfere in other people's affairs. This increasingly bothered him the more time he spent with Elfi. Once she searched through his mattress to find a draft of a letter to Elfi and read it. When Andreas came into the room, she didn't even look up from the page, but continued to skim the lines. When she had finished, she turned to him and said: "Write to say hello to her. I hope she comes back soon. It's bad enough that she just left for Bolzano. If I were you, I wouldn't have let her get away with it. Once you're married, she'll dance around on your nose too. Is that what you want?"
In all his love for Elfi, he just shook his head. Frieda even went so far as to insist on being allowed to write a paragraph in the second letter he wrote to Elfi that week.
"I want her to know that we may live in the country here, but we're far from being lazy or stupid," she said to Andreas.
So she wrote all over one page of his precious letter to Elfi in her scrawling, unclean handwriting, thus destroying the contract of intimacy that they had concluded through their correspondence. Andreas had no other choice at the time; if he refused Frieda's wish, she would have made his life hell. She controlled her parents along with his brothers and, as he was slighter than his brothers at the time and they always made fun of him because of his blond hair and mummy's boy status, he didn't know what to do. From this point on, he realized that the people around Frieda were just pawns for her, which she pushed around for her own amusement.
Andreas returns to the present with some of his thoughts and sighs. Even though he missed Elfi so terribly back then, he would give anything to relive those events. Nevertheless, that time will never come again and there will never be another like it for him. Looking back into the past is all he has left. These memories drive him into a waiting room between life and death, where all the dying are to be found.
He strokes his head, touches the wound, which feels like a small, aching balloon. He should drive back to his apartment. Fifteen kilometers separate the two of them. He has to get up from his bench in front of the hospital, walk through Wangen to the parking lot where he has parked his car and drive off. That wouldn't have been a problem before and even though they have sucked the water out of his lungs so that he can breathe more easily, he doesn't feel any better. He gets up and walks slowly on shaky legs towards the city to his car.
He's home an hour later. He doesn't know how he managed it. While he was driving, he tried hard not to faint again. Now he's lying in bed, his favorite place since he's been so weak, thinking about Elfi again, who hasn't been lying next to him for a while. He shakes his head, trying to banish the rising pain. The ringing telephone next to his bed makes him forget his suffering. He suspects who is calling. Ever since his family found out about his cancer, they have been looking after him, which disturbs him. He would much rather just lie here and not get up again. It is not just weakness that drives him to bed when the sun is shining, it is a sadness that has always been there, resonating in the background and only now paralyzing him in its entirety.
"Hey grandpa, how are you? Have you eaten anything today? Have you had enough to drink?" a gentle voice sounds from the loudspeaker.
"Hello Anne, yes, I ..." he hesitates, sensing that he is getting worse despite lying down. "I fell in Wangen, went to hospital and went back home to bed."
"But why is that? Didn't they want to keep you there?"
"No, ... you, ... It wasn't a bad fall, I just toppled over for a moment. I suddenly couldn't breathe."
"I'll call Tom straight away, he'll pick you up and you'll go back to the hospital. What were you thinking?"
"It doesn't have to be, I..."
Before he can finish the sentence, his daughter-in-law hangs up. A short time later, his son comes to pick him up with the words: "What do you look like?" and takes him to hospital, where he is admitted as an inpatient. The wound on his head is bandaged and he is given a blood transfusion, as his red blood cell count has now reached a critical level. He dislikes this procedure, this commotion about his person, but he puts up with it anyway, because he can't put up any more resistance than a shake of the head.
He spends a day in hospital until his values have stabilized again. Tom picks him up and takes him back to his apartment, where he has lived for fifty-five years. After his stay in hospital, he notices that his clothes are looser than before. He looks in the mirror and notices that he looks haggard, as if he is ten kilograms lighter. He estimates that it must be the lack of water in his lungs. At least he no longer feels so bloated. He was never overweight, always slim and strong and could eat what he wanted without gaining much weight. The winter before, when he already knew about his cancer, he cleared the snow from his sister's yard all by himself. He was 85 years old then. He would never have thought that old age would bring him to his knees in this way. He lived as if he was invulnerable, as if nothing could harm him. But his lack of appetite, coupled with the leukemia, was wearing away at him bit by bit.
Andreas can no longer stand his reflection in the mirror. He turns away and remembers that he hasn't yet entered the trip in his logbook, and it also seems far too warm in his apartment. First he regulates the temperature to exactly 18.5 degrees, then he documents his journey to Wangen and back in an A6 notebook, all but one page of which is written in full. In the beginning it was just a game, out of interest and greed, but for years now his whim has turned into a compulsion that keeps him busy and gives him structure. Overwhelmed by weakness, he goes back to bed. He knows that some of his family will soon be looking after him again. It is shortly after midday when he falls asleep.
After five hours, he is woken from his sleep by the door of his apartment bursting open and footsteps in the hallway. Andreas is startled awake. At first he doesn't know where he is, the events of the day mingle. Then he remembers that he is in his bed. He throws back the covers, gets up and steps out of the room. Three people are standing in front of him: his son with his wife and one of his granddaughters. "Ah, hello," he says, trying to be effusively friendly, throwing his hands in front of his body and wanting to greet them, but all three of them stand there with rigid, unmoving expressions.
"Grandpa, it can't go on like this. You can't just fall and then drive home again."
Andreas nods guiltily, vows to do better, eats a piece of bread with sausage and cheese under her eyes, has his son renew the bandage on his head and, when they have left, lies back in bed. He spreads his arm over the right side of the bed, which he doesn't dare lie on because it was Elfi's side. It is cold in his bedroom, the dull brown cupboards do not provide any comfort. His stomach hurts from the bread he didn't like but had to eat to get his family off his back. He only regrets things that he can no longer change. For example, how just a year ago he could walk long distances without any effort, up to ten kilometers at a time. Now, walking to the front door costs him considerable energy. His deterioration is progressing faster than he can cope with.
His lack of appetite, coupled with his dissatisfaction with his situation, causes his body to lose another five kilos in three weeks. Sometimes he gets dizzy when he goes from the bedroom to the living room or to the toilet. Once he falls, but comes away with bruised knees and hands. The next time, he can no longer save himself on an adjacent piece of furniture or a chair as he goes black before his eyes. He falls onto his hip, which breaks with a dull crack like that of a large branch. As he lies on the floor, he loses consciousness until his son Tom finds him at midday and calls the ambulance. It all passes Andreas by, as if in a dream. He indifferently accepts the fact that he is to be operated on.
He has to wait three days for the operation and is given strong painkillers until then, which put him in a twilight state in which he doesn't have to feel himself or his grief. On the day before the operation, a Sunday, his family comes to visit him at three intervals: his two sons, Tom and Arthur, with their wives, Anne and Martina, and his three grandchildren: Marius, Pia and Lena. They all get caught up in meaningless questions because they don't know how to deal with the situation. "How are you? What did you have to eat today? When do they want to operate on you? Have you got everything? Should we pour you another water? Please make sure you drink enough, okay?"
They say goodbye in the way you say goodbye to a dying person, with a heaviness in their eyes that makes their gaze sink to the ground. Dying is out of the question for him, he doesn't want to deal with that thought. He certainly will at some point, but not from such a ridiculous operation on his hip and certainly not from this dubious cancer, the exact name of which he will never remember.
After calm returns and he slips into a restless sleep from sheer exhaustion, he sees a projection of the young Elfi standing next to his bed and looking down at him. He reaches out for her, reaches through her into the void. Andreas keeps trying. With each new attempt, she moves a little further away. When he wakes up, it feels as if a glass of water has been spilled on his pillow. He turns to the other side and tries to revive the memory of Elfi as she was before the dementia that has eroded her spirit and thus her dignity year by year. When he tries to remember her now, he only thinks of his wife shortly before her death, how she lay in bed hunched over, her head turned to one side, staring past him with her mouth open. He tried to read something in her gaze, without success. The once so strong woman who had been with him all his life was long gone.
Andreas kept hoping that she would get better, that one day she would open her eyes, recognize him and press a kiss to his mouth, but that wasn't the case. Every time before a visit he wished she would do it, just open her eyes and kiss him, and every time he was disappointed and cursed his God for doing this to him. At this time, he caught himself not remembering the time when Elfi was still healthy. He only managed to do this when he held old photos of her in his hands.
For eight years, she vegetated in a nursing home specializing in dementia. Eight years in which he began to live his own life, in which he had to learn to look after himself. During which he went from invitation to invitation to avoid being alone and to save money for a day that never came. What bothered him most during this time was that he couldn't spend all his savings with his Elfi, but had to pay for part of his place in the home. So he applied for social assistance to ensure that he would continue to receive a share from the state for the home, which he would otherwise have had to pay for himself. He didn't want to waste all his money on a home that was incapable of making Elfi well. His stinginess was the reason why he, Elfi and his two sons had gone without extensive vacations, expensive trips and major purchases all those years. The reason why it is never warmer than 18.5 degrees in his apartment in winter, why he buys his bread at half price and why he has eaten boiled potatoes with milk, butter and a tiny piece of cheese almost every day for the past few years. He took all this upon himself because it was cheap and he didn't want his dwindling fortune to mean that all the years of drudgery and sacrifice that gave his life meaning were in vain. Tears trickle down his cheeks onto the white bed linen. He covers his face with the blanket, stifles a sob and finally falls asleep with the tormenting memories.
Over the next few days, the two patients in his room, of whom he was unaware due to the painkillers, are replaced by two new ones. There are three of them in the room. He, a man called Bert, and another emaciated man called Adrian, who is also recovering from an operation and doesn't speak much. It is March and unusually warm, so they open the windows to let in the warmth that hints at the coming spring. A scent filled with sun meeting earth spreads through the room. Bert, who is lying next to him and whose legs are as thick as a baby elephant's due to his diabetes, has also lost his wife, which connects them in a strange way. Bert, with his reddish gray beard and sturdy build, looks more like a walrus than a human. He also complains of pain, which has been with him for years. Before his daughter had him admitted to hospital, he just managed to pocket a bottle of brandy, which he now proudly presents. When he tells Andreas the story, a kind of joy is reflected in his face that Andreas only knows from the faces of children.
The three of them make a plan to save their medicine cups and wait until after dinner, when the nurses usually only check on them just before 10 pm. After their plates have been cleared from dinner, they sit up and Bert fills the little plastic cups with brandy. They drink five of them in quick succession, calling it their happy hour. For them, it is an act of rebellion, something they do to show those who make decisions about them. A form of freedom and self-determination that they have gradually surrendered to their families over the years.
After a week, Andreas is discharged from hospital. Still thin and weak, but refueled with new blood transfusions. His hip only hurts when he walks. Once again, his appetite refuses to work due to the lack of exercise. Even though it is clear when he arrives at his apartment that he will no longer be able to look after himself, let alone do simple things without help: showering, getting dressed, he does not want to admit that this will not change. Now he is completely dependent on the help of his family. First and foremost his son Tom, who checks on him three times a day, prepares his food, washes him and takes care of the last bit of housework.
When he faints and falls once again due to his inadequate fluid intake and the lack of oxygen in his blood, it becomes clear that he cannot go on like this. His son Tom, who owns a nursing service, gets him a special hospital bed. This makes it easier for him to get up until he loses consciousness again. Once again, so much water has collected in his lungs that he can hardly breathe. Andreas is admitted to hospital again, where they connect him to tubes: one to suck out the water, the other to refresh his blood. He stays one night. This time there is no schnapps.
Back home and in better shape, Andreas realizes that he is now definitely too weak to stand up and move around the apartment on his own without help, which makes him angry. His upper arms are now no thicker than his wrists and his legs are just thin stilts. He finds it shameful how his body is letting him down after all this time.
He just exists, lies there and waits for his end. There should be so much going through his mind, but there is nothing left to think about. He feels empty and exhausted, nothing more. Thoughts of Elfi disappear. Some days it seems to him as if there had never been a life with her. The days blur into one another and the time he spends in bed turns into a long day during which he falls asleep again and again. His son Tom looks after him three times a day as usual, his family brings him food and comes over, his grandchildren talk to him on the phone. However, the conversations never last longer than ten minutes. He accepts his surroundings and the events around him with a kind of indifference, which he pushes in front of his sadness, which ultimately pushes itself to the fore and paralyzes his innermost being. He spent over a year of his life in the waiting room between life and death, where his cancer had confined him. A space between worlds in which he can only endure because his gaze is directed towards the door at the other end, behind which he hopes to be able to embrace his Elfi again, for whom he longs so much.
On Monday morning, July 17th, Andreas sits up in bed after his breakfast, which consisted of half a jam sandwich, to reach for a glass of water. He brings his hand, trembling under the weight of the water, to his mouth when he sees the appearance of his Elfi in front of him. She stands still, smiling at him. At first he doesn't recognize her, as it is a younger version of her. Then he remembers. It is the version of her from when they went on their first outing together. The Elfi who stood at the summit cross and gazed into the distance. The Elfi he lost his heart to forever. She looks down at herself, smoothes her white blouse and adjusts her dark brown skirt. Then she reaches out for him. Andreas instinctively knows what to do. He puts down the glass of water and tries to reach for her hand, but doesn't succeed at first. On his fourth attempt, he finally touches her. A feeling of peace fills him. His sadness is wiped away. He feels light and strong at the same time. Elfi smiles at him and pulls him towards her. He gets up and follows her to the end of the waiting room, the door of which is now open. White-yellow light bathes his body in bright rays and transforms him into his twenty-three-year-old self. Together they step through the door, leave the waiting room and Andreas this life forever.