Translation Tuesday: “Bambirambo” by Mario Schlembach

“Do you know what decomposition sounds like?” The rotating wings of the circling flies tumbling over each other. A humming and buzzing, vibrations, drawing the gaze, as if the dead creature were a place of life. You want to capture the moment, and you press the shutter button.

***

Once freed, this memory plunges you into the blood-colored afternoon. It’s early summer. You hear the noise of the old SAME tractor’s motor. The even strokes of the mower as it carves its path through the high grass around the dilapidated barracks. You, all of eight years old, go ahead to warn your father of barbed wire, rocks or ditches that are too deep. New relics grow each year out of the once scorched earth. You don’t yet know that you’re mowing over death and oblivion. It’s only much later that you’ll see photos from back then.

*

1940. Wood barracks, a seemingly unending number of them, and more than 50,000 people from all over the world, locked up like animals at a time when what was thought to be impossible had become possible. The brutalized bodies no more than display material and research objects for a perverted, deadly science.

*

The grass dries up into hay in three days. Your father rakes it into windrows and then brings the press. The machine advances tirelessly, picking up everything, as the unvarying waltz-like dance bathes your senses in its soporific rhythm, unleashing your fantasy.

Hoosh. Hoosh.
Hoosh. Hoosh.
Hoosh. Hoosh.

*

You bundle the small balls with the blue nylon cord, drag them out of the enclosure and set them aside in a row. Sometimes you see snakes that have been chopped up, and you get horribly frightened when, with their final movements, they try to free themselves from the packed hay. You’ve been scared of these animals ever since you saw how a grass snake thrashed its way out of your grandfather’s excrement just as you were about to sit down on his still warm pit toilet.

*

You keep glancing up at the former playground for grownups. A parcourse with rusted ladders, ditches and broken cement structures that have iron poles rising out of them – that’s what you see. You never once made it over the first hurdle. How strong must your father and all the other soldiers have been, those who completed their basic military training at these barracks after the war was over?

*

Your father thrusts the pitchfork into the short side of the rectangular bale of hay and swings it up onto the trailer, where your mother stacks it. You try to help your parents as best you can, but the fine dust particles scratch your throat and your skin. You sneeze. Black stuff runs out of your nose.

*

While your parents drive the loaded truck over to your family’s farm, one kilometer away, you’re supposed to gather up loose bits of hay at the edge of the woods. Suddenly, you hear something between the trees. Soft, but deep breaths. You take two steps forward. A small deer is lying there, hidden under a bush. It’s wounded, missing a leg. You sit down next to it. The brown fur with the white spots feels oily to the touch. The fawn has lost all its strength. You scrutinize every bone in its body, as if there were no flesh between them. Its black eyes are empty and full of fear.

*

Your father returns. You run to him and beg him to do something to save the deer. Probably guilt-ridden because his machine crippled it, he grabs the fawn. As soon as you are sitting on the tractor’s trailer, he places it into your arms. The sun blinds you. You feel the animal’s heartbeat against your chest. You drive uphill through the woods, taking the curvy way that leads to the neighboring village. The street is bumpy. You feel nauseous.

*

A veterinarian takes on the emergency case. He cleans and sews up the wound. “No, the deer won’t die,” he says afterward, but the next days will be critical, he adds. “And its leg?” you ask cluelessly, as if he could magically pull one of out of a drawer and use it to make the fawn whole again. “It will have to live with three.”

*

Once home you try to feed the deer. It can’t be that old, so you take some of the milk for the lambs, which gave you stomach cramps after just two sips that one time you tasted it out of curiosity. The fawn won’t open its mouth. After a while, it slowly approaches the imitation teat that your family acquired for tricky cases and swallows a few drops. It continues to lie nearly motionless in your arms, and you can’t bring yourself to leave it alone overnight.

*

The next day the fawn’s eyes become more lucid. Its breath is even. It tries to stand up, to find its balance, but it falls back down. You’re too sad to take part in this over-and-over-again fight, and you run out to the workshop. Using the smoothing plane that belonged to your grandfather, who had been a wheelwright and returned from Stalingrad with a stiff left arm, you craft – without knowing how – a prosthesis. There must be something you can do so your newly won friend doesn’t realize it’s missing something. You hammer a leather strap onto the piece of wood, but nothing you do works well enough.

*

You return to the stable, disappointed. The deer is standing there in front of you on its weak three legs. It’s still a little wobbly, and it’s frightened and shy, so you talk to it. “You have to be strong and unafraid now,” you say, and you tell him stories about the best, most heroic fighters of your imagination.

*

You name the fawn Bambi, because you think every deer is called that. Middle name: Rambo.

*

Once Bambirambo is strong enough, you go with it out to the sheep yard, and you build it a shelter using the old doghouse. The fawn initially stays by your side, only slowly venturing off a little further. It eats fresh grass. Its fur gleams in the sun. After just a few days it’s hopping around on its legs as if it had never gotten around any other way. The sheep don’t accept Bambirambo at first. It has to fight for its place every day, which makes the ram aggressive. You want to help the deer, but you mustn’t, says your father, “They have to work things out on their own.” Bambirambo is butted to the ground, but it hangs in there and keeps trying. You sit in a tree, cheering for your charge by yelling its name on end: “Bambirambo. Bambirambo. Bambirambo.”

*

Bambirambo has surely made it, but you know the deer can’t stay at your side forever. Its world is waiting out there. Maybe it even still has family somewhere? You tie a blue nylon cord around its neck and walk with it over the fields. You go by the old camp cemetery, where “more than 10,000 Soviet soldiers, as well as Poles, Bulgarians, Yugoslavians, Romanians, French, Italians, Belgians, English, Americans, ethnic German refugees and persons of unknown nationality” lie, as is written on the sign under the big black cross. You were told the French were ripped out of the ground immediately after the war and transferred back to their homeland. You can’t yet fathom all the names and terms, and the history behind them. Your father calls this place a “Russian graveyard,” and you would like to ask your grandfather why he decided to establish his farm on this spot, of all places. Don’t his surroundings force him to confront his wounds every day? But you remain silent, as is custom in your family.

*

Bambirambo eats the grass between the grey nameless stones. You gaze downhill at your family’s fields, where sugar beets are now growing. The leaves are plump, green. A single brown strip runs between the rows. This is where the path to the prisoner of war camp would have been, your father told you. The earth has been too trampled upon for anything to grow. “The scars of time are visible, if you sharpen you graze,” you’ll one day write. But until then, all these places will remain your playground.

*

You keep a lookout for Bambirambo’s family in the woods. Together, you walk along the fence of the military K-9 unit. The German shepherd you love so much in the TV show Kommissar Rex was trained here, someone once told you, which is why you spent whole days camped out in front of the gates with a cold cut sandwich, though your hero never appeared. You head on to the quarry, the reason why the village was established here. “The era’s greatest masters of stone masonry extracted the material and transformed it for use in Vienna’s symbolic institutions. In the Hofburg Palace or the Burg Theater: Wherever you go today you’ll encounter Kaiserstein, which gave this location its name,” they told you in school, but you almost fell asleep, bored to death by all these facts that never interested you.

*

Before it gets dark, you and Bambirambo make it to the ruin of an old gloriette that was started in 1917 as a thank you to the emperor for the profits from the war but was never finished. Everything is still – only the branches move in the wind. Suddenly in the distance: shots. There is still practice going on for a war that apparently no one has remembered for a long time.

*

A thunderstorm gathers during the night. You want to protect Bambirambo, not leave the deer alone outside in its hut like usual, and you bring it back to the stable. The next morning the sky is clear. You run to the animals. Bambirambo is sleeping, you think, but as you lay your hand on its fur, you feel neither its breath, nor its heartbeat. Its eyes are black like buttons. You don’t understand what has happened. The veterinarian – whose first opening is in the afternoon – also can’t give you an explanation. “A poisonous plant in the hay, an infection … it could have been anything.”

*

Your father carries Bambirambo out and sets the dead deer down near the manure pile so he can take it away later. You stare at your friend for a long time and cannot accept what’s to come. You want to gain time, and before

Bambirambo is gone forever, you take the green wheelbarrow that you got for your birthday and place the deer in it. It only needs some rest, you think, then it will get better and stand up, like it always has. Bambirambo is a fighter, and if you wait long enough, then it will certainly come back to life.

*

You push the wheelbarrow to the old barracks. The main gate is locked, but you know that wild boar have torn a large hole in the wire-mesh fencing next to the former officers’ canteen. The prisoner barracks are just a little ways on, the only ones from both world wars that remain standing.

*

Back at the spot where you found the deer, you make a little bed out of hay. The fawn lies in front of you, sheltered. The air is warm. Swarms of cicadas are singing, and you smell the scent of freshly cut grass.

*

You already know what death means. You know there is no such thing as a good end. You know all this, and yet you can’t accept it. Not yet! Bambirambo will wake up in just a second, or so you think. You only have to wait until what has been done is once again undone. You only have to wait until all of this reveals itself to be a dream, a sheer fantasy, and you return to your idyll. You only have to wait until…

*

The first flies arrive. They settle on the deer’s motionless eye. It doesn’t twitch at all. It’s not long until the other flesh flies and blow flies follow the smell of death. Around you a swarm of black dots gleam poisonous green in the sun. Their humming and buzzing is so loud that it drones in your ears. You try to shoo them away with a branch. It’s hopeless.

*

When night falls, you have to return home. You cover the fawn with some grass so it won’t be discovered by other animals and stays protected, or so you think. When you come back the next morning, Bambirambo’s final resting place has been ransacked. Its fur has been ripped off in many spots. Its muscle is visible. The vibrating black areas keep multiplying.

*

You sit next to your friend every day, and what you see changes every time. There’s more than just flies there now; millipedes, digger wasps, worms, skin beetles fill the carcass with pulsating life. “The burying beetle primarily uses the carrion to feed its brood,” you read in an entomology handbook, and you inform yourself elsewhere about the stages of decomposition:

I. Onset of decay
II. Adipoid decomposition
III. Formation of caseous products
IV. Ammonical decay
V. Onset of desiccation
VI. Extreme desiccation
VII. Skeletonization

*

If you were to bury the deer, it would decompose eight times slower, you read in Casper’s Dictum. It happens quickest in the air. You document every change

to the body of the fawn. You press the shutter button of your instant camera and wait until the black framed by white reveals a snapshot of a past moment. It takes thirty-nine days for your friend Bambirambo to completely disappear.

***

The only thing you can still hear is the sound of rotating wings in the wind, a sound you will never forget. “I’ll come back,” you promise Bambirambo. “I’ll come back!” Even when, one day, you stop mowing this spot, you won’t let any grass grow on it. You will shine a light on the past until darkness is no longer an option. You will write as if it were still the innocent days of back then. You will hold onto Bambirambo and let him live anew in every story that you tell. You will write and fail. You will fail and keep going. You will despair until, at some point, you yourself disappear into words so as to rip the foreign voices out of this earth.

*

“Do you know what decomposition sounds like?” I ask you…

Translated from the German by Cristina Burack.

Mario Schlembach was born in 1985 in Hainburg an der Donau, Austria, and grew up on a farm next to the cemetery of a former prisoner-of-war camp. He studied theater, film and media studies, as well as philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Vienna, and later attended the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film. His writing has been published in numerous literary magazines and leading German-language newspapers. Schlembach has released three novels, the most recent (heute graben) in 2022. Schlembach, who splits his time between Vienna and the state of Lower Austria, works as a grave digger in addition to being a writer.

Cristina Burack is based in Bonn, Germany, where she works as a writer, editor and translator of German into English. Her translated literary work has previously appeared in No Man’s Land, The Common and Asymptote. She holds bachelors’ degrees in European History and Voice and Opera Performance, with a special focus on German Lieder, and a masters in European Studies.