Paulus Hochgatterer: Der Tag, an dem mein Großvater ein Held war.

The Day When My Grandfather Was A Hero.
Sample text:

The swallows are there. Sometimes something like that changes everything. You are standing somewhere, for instance in front of the house, and thinking or observing the clouds as you do every day, and after a while you notice that something is different. First you look along the horizon, over the hills, the roofs, the treetops. Then you try to find a whistling in the air, a humming or perhaps a smell. In the end you look to see if you have not noticed that you have torn a hole in your clothes, in the sleeve perhaps, on the knee or under the arm. You do not find anything. Suddenly you know what it is: it is the swallows that have returned.
Apart from that today everything is as it was yesterday. The racing clouds, the molehills, the fallen branches under the fruit trees, the nuthatch that is running up and down on the barn wall. Nuthatches are animals that bring good luck, Laurenz says, just like toads or hedgehogs or stag-beetles. Magpies and foxes bring bad luck, he says. The swallows swoop down like arrows and fly lop-sided loops between the barn and the stable. They are the ones with the little white bellies and the v-tails, not the ones with the forked tails and the red throats. Chimney swallows, house martins. It is pointless, I mix them up all the time. Now and then they land for a few seconds on the ridge of the barn. As for swallows, I'm not sure whether they bring good luck or bad luck.
I go back into the house, climb up the staircase, turn left into the girls' room and take one of the brown exercise books out of the cupboard, a pencil and the little penknife with the horn handle. Nobody sees me. Back down and outside again. I walk from the barn door diagonally across the meadow to the house garden, along the grey wooden fence and then between the fields and up the hill. Up at the top, to one side of the stunted blackthorn bush, I turn round quickly on my own axis, once and once again and once again. Then I sit down on the meadow. In this place, right beside the bush, the soil is almost always dry. I look around me. I see everything here. My place is here.
They say my name is Nelly. Sometimes I believe that, sometime I don't. Sometimes I think my name is Elisabeth or Katharina. Or Isolde, like the young salesgirl in the hat shop. Sometimes I go down into the town because of her. When I stand in the street in front of the shop and look through the window Isolde's torso floats inside through space, along the shelves, back and forth. The head with the chestnut brown false hairpiece floats with it. From the waist down she cannot be seen. I imagine that her lower half has sat down somewhere. Perhaps walking up and down has become too much of an effort for it. Perhaps it does not like the false hairpiece or the way the upper half says 'What can I do for you?' But I tell nobody about such things.
They say I'm thirteen, that there's a document somewhere, to be precise a piece of paper with a stamp that has my name and date of birth on it. I've never seen this piece of paper. Anyway I don't care about my birthday. Nobody here celebrates birthdays. Name days, yes, birthdays, no. Nobody knows when my name day is. When I ask about it people shrug their shoulders. When I ask about school they get nervous. Laurenz says that everyone has of course to learn something, but there's a time for everything. At the moment it's best for everybody if I wait a while for school. I don't know what is really the best for me.
There are a couple of things I know for sure: I've been here for one hundred and forty six days. I have a plan. Sometimes I lie.
Since the third or fourth day I've made strokes in my first brown exercise book, on the last page and one for each day. Four vertical, one horizontal, nothing but bundles of five strokes. Laurenz said, 'How do you know how it works?' 'No idea,' I said, and he said, 'Like a fighter pilot.' Then he gave me the exercise book, just like that. 'You look like somebody who likes to write,' he said, adding that he had once looked like that too. That led to him first being sent to a seminary and then made a military clerk at the front.

(p.7 ff)

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