GLina died yesterday. But maybe she didn't die at all, but rides in a golden stagecoach straight through the wicked classes of heaven. Lina is the deaconess, which I have sometimes visited in the last few years up on the Pfefferhügel next to the Weltispital. Lina's life was exciting, and I could certainly tell you a thing or two about it. For example, that Lina except for two coarse skirts borrowed from the Diakonie, has had nothing personal about the many postcards and photo albums in her long life. Even though she put her life into the service of Jesus Christ, and believed, that not all people ride through the sky in a golden stagecoach, Lina loved people almost against her will. A few years before her death, however, Lina suddenly let me know through the flower, that she no longer likes life in the community of sisters, and she is once again "busted". And, sie wollte sogar ihren Orden zurückgeben und wurde heimlich ein Mitglied der obskuren spiritistischen Vereinigung „die heiligen Lichtflüsterer“! But I think, it was just a small act of desperation. Basically Lina just wanted to feel the freedom again!
Lina's life path was decided at the beginning of the 1930s. At that time, the eighteen-year-old waited reluctantly at the Seeblick inn in the Bernese Oberland, when the village pastor entered it. He was the host's friend and regularly drank his kirsch in the lake view. He always sat down at the regulars' table immediately behind the counter and not with the farmers and workers, crouched at the surrounding tables. Lina had the landlord's instructions, Always fill the pastor's glass generously over the line with kirsch, but the glasses of the workers and peasants only to below the line. Because Lina ignored this instruction from the landlord, and also filled the glasses of the workers and peasants over the line with kirsch, yes just this one!, the landlord wanted her gone. So he sat down with the village priest at the regulars' table and presented the problem to him, whereupon the village pastor called Lina over to the table. No, she is really not a pretty waitress with her big stool nose, the slight hump and the monkey bite, thought the village priest. It will be difficult for her in marriage. But maybe I can place her in Bern with the deaconesses as a nurse. He eyed Lina in amazement, and tried in vain to encourage her with a few frivolities. Lina was just as accessible to flirt games as an unprepared stone. "No, fill it up completely, girl!“, said the pastor. Whereupon Lina simply put the cherry bottle on the table next to him and, to the innumerable annoyance, disappeared behind the counter.
The option, that unmarried women, die nicht über die besten Waffen der Reproduktion verfügten, entered the order, was not completely absurd back then. I never realized, though, if Lina really didn't care about men, or whether she simply accepted the role assigned to her, as was expected of a woman like her. Jesus, whom she served, was a man too, after all! “But Linchen, have you really never had a husband?“I asked her sometimes as a little girl, when she was visiting us, während meine Schwester Valentina ihre pappmaschige, Opened the nurse's hood fastened with at least forty hairpins. Lina's open black hair fell to the back of her knees. Valentina handed me the needles and started, braid one strand of hair around the next. I stood by and was amazed “You know, do not you, Jeanny, she's only married to the one up there!“Valentina made an angry head movement against the ceiling of the room, at which I looked concerned. Lina, who laughed heartily, hugged me. She tenderly called me Finöggeli. *
Lina was a senior physician in the eye department in the world hospital, where she was nineteen seventy in the operating room on a newly trained nurse, meine Mutter, met. Later we were with Lina in Lower Austria on summer vacation. The little town was close to the Slovakian border and was full of billowing grain- and sunflower fields, as far as the eye could see.
In the last weeks and months of her life, when she was already in need of oxygen, Every second Sunday of the month Lina let Didi take her to the “Holy Light Whisperers”. This was done in secret. As well, as your wish, to bring me beer in large plastic bags. Lina had always enjoyed drinking beer and did so in public during our vacation together. How she justified the consumption of alcohol before God, I do not know. In any case, I always told the Tamil nurse at the gate, in the plastic bags there would be Coca Cola. But then I stopped, that Coca Cola is also a sin, before God, even if not that big (sin) like the beer, but definitely a small one, wicked. That's what I said at the gate, There was lemonade in the plastic bags.
Lina has always called out loud, hardly that I closed the door to her room behind me: “Bring the beer!” I immediately rushed to her bed, I put the beer in her hand, I clasped her hand in mine. I put a drinking straw into the bottle and brought it to her lips. Lina sat up in bed with such a jerk, that I was always scared, the plastic tubes with the oxygen could slip out of her nostrils. That was how greedy she was for the beer, she sucked so hard on the stalk!
Once I made up my mind, to come out with the truth and tell the Tamil nurse in the hallway straight in the face, that there is no lemonade in my plastic bag. Neither does Coca Cola. But dark, nutritious beer, Feldschlösschen brand, of course non-alcoholic! I will now be led away, because I give something other than tea to a dying person, it went through my head for a moment. I was then all the more astonished, that the Tamil nurse didn't care at all about my confession. She just cast a disrespectful look at the bottle and yawned.
One day when I walked into Lina's room as usual with my plastic bag, I met her in a state of dissolution. I had only ever seen her as a master, full of positive strength and happiness, which is why I was now frightened. She held her hands over her head, whimpered and howled loudly: “Jeanny, what have you done, what have you done?! They all know, all! What a misfortune, oh, No, Oh no!” – “What are you talking about?”, I asked puzzled. I was just about to get the can opener out of her Bible compartment, then Lina screamed: “Away with the beer! she! they all! Think I'm a witch, a devil! I didn't tell you, you should secretly smuggle the beer for me?! So, that nobody sees it?! I should have known, that it doesn't turn out well! But, What shall I do! What am I supposed to do?!” She hid her face in her hands.
I was trembling too. “But Linchen, this beer, Linchen … höre mir zu …. this beer is not one, that you … Linchen! … makes you drunk, makes you disreputable ... it is ... if you think about it carefully ... just like a lemonade!“
She was ninety-seven and on the edge of her physical strength. But it wasn't that alone. Suddenly I found out, that you, now, at the end of her life a kind of thread of patience broke. She herself had never made a secret of it, that she preferred to spend her weekends with acquaintances and friends. She would rather climb a mountain or celebrate with extravagant baptisms or marriages of distant friends, instead of spending Sundays in the “circle of sisters”. The sisters, all now between eighty and ninety years old, had found out about Lina's beer consumption, but the bullying had been going on for much longer. Lina had never been a bigot!
Aroused, unconventional and an excellent surgical nurse, she had been transferred to a hospital on the Swiss border during the Second World War, where they, as a barely twenty year old, was busy for weeks, to remove splinters from the soldiers' eyes. Again and again she acted as a mediator between Poles and Germans. These are said to have attacked each other with gauze bandages around their heads and thanked Lina for their part, by laying her swollen potatoes in bed!
Later she was the right hand man of a well-known professor at a large district hospital, who openly raved about the connection of Switzerland to the German Reich. When Lina showed up for work one morning in nineteen forty-three, she discovered a huge picture of Adolf Hitler over the entrance to the operating room and backed away. „Meyer, I don't enter the operating theater earlier, Than you removed the criminal's image!“The professor felt offended, by a woman, just yet, of a woman, whom he secretly admired for their professional skills, to be approached like that. Nevertheless, he let Lina lead him into the hallway by the arm. A number of curious assistants and orderlies formed a circle around the quarreling couple. Again and again Lina pointed her finger at the picture and threatened: “Take this Hitler, get this criminal out of here, otherwise I won't operate!“Whereupon the professor suddenly lost his nerve: “You will be released sooner, than you believe, Mrs. colleague! People, removes this monkey from my field of vision forever!”
The beginning of the sixties was a crucial year for Lina, for she almost answered the call to freedom, for the sake of work. She had been asked by Doctor Kaufmann, with him, to open an independent eye practice. Lina valued her long-term superior at the St. Gallen very much, and she was ready, to break with the order for her new task. Unfortunately it didn't happen. Just before the adventure could begin, After visiting a patient at night, Doctor Kaufmann raced his car against a bridge pillar. He was dead instantly. Meanwhile, Lina waited two nights and two days in the freshly furnished practice rooms between unused gauzes, Knives and bandages on a stool on Doctor Kaufmann or a voice, that told her, what she should do now. Maybe she was able, to lead the practice alone? Then she was called back by the superior and re-blessed as a deaconess in a rapid process.
For the second time, Lina's future as a deaconess was sealed. Her home was now for the remaining fifty years room forty-seven in the Diakonissenhaus Bern, opposite the world hospital, that became her place of work again. There, she met my mother at the eye clinic in the early 1970s, who gained her first work experience there as a surgical nurse. Nineteen seventy-three my mother brought Valentina to work in the cradle, but soon retired from work. But Lina had eaten a fool of us, about me, the Finöggeli, meinem Vater Hannes, the quick-tempered, my gentle mother and Valentina, the ambitious. And, later she even made the acquaintance of Valentina's plugs Lillie and Faun.
In the past year, Lina's robust health has suddenly deteriorated significantly, and she made up all sorts of excuses, so that you don't have to be driven into the garden in a wheelchair. She would rather sit with a large magnifying glass over a puzzle or do crossword puzzles. “Find me the saber! I am at the Battle of Trafalgar”, she called once to greet them, when I got lemonade with a plastic bag (I brought lemonade again now) rushed into the room. Or: “A five letter playboy, you know, what is that, Jeanny, a playboy with S …. chs? What is that supposed to be anyway!?”, I enjoyed browsing through the old photo albums with Lina, which showed tiny black and white jagged photographs of her and her family from the beginning of last century. Her parents' house with her pipe-smoking father on the bench, two goats and the single cow, the pride of the father, in the garden. Lina had four sisters and three brothers, they all died early, but in the photographs they pose for an eerily fascinating eternity. Once we inspected a yellow-tinged photo from our vacation at the Slovakian border. It showed my energetic-looking father in black running shorts from the Allblacks association, my distant blonde mother, the beautiful pouting Valentina, also in the black club running shorts. The three are rounded off by a radiant Lina on one side and me on the other, slightly cut off by the camera. Lina pulled the magnifying glass up to the photograph and ejected: “What kind of rags do your father and sister have on their bodies??” - “But you know, of, they are back then, always like demon in this hottest summer of the decade, twice a day, walked through the cornfields, Dad and Tina. At ten in the morning, when the sun was already pressing on the kilometer-wide arching fields, and everything plunged into a haze, you know what. And then again in the evening, when the sky tore open and millions of swarms of mosquitoes danced in the cone of the blood-red sunset.” – “Correct. There were mosquitos everywhere, especially in the stone of the old house and in the space between the double window panes, who were so thin, that they trembled at the slightest blast of air. Of constantly scratched the mosquito bites. You hunted mosquitoes for nights, the little hum of the mosquitoes did not let you sleep and you often cried and woke the sleepers around you …."-" I?" - "Yes you! During the day you preferred to be alone, but in the dark you sought connection and became a night owl. ”There was a knock on the door. Didi with a book in hand, on the stand: ‘Was uns im Jenseits erwartet’ leaned down to Lina and hugged her. "May I introduce: this is Jeanny, a tender too tender little plant and the daughter of Ursina, the greatest nurse, that I was ever allowed to lead in the ops. And this is Didi, he is a medium of the light whisperers and my light figure. He will help me make decisions….“I shook hands with Didi, und wollte mich schnell auf die Socken machen, but Lina held me back: “You can listen, what Didi and I have to discuss. Morgen Sonntag bringt mich Didi durch den Hauswarts-Eingang heimlich von hier fort zu einem Mitglied der Lichtflüsterern im Thurgauischen …." - "This means, you run away and you won't come back?"-" If everything goes well, then not. It's like a real kidnapping, do you understand …“Lina was trembling with excitement. “And your medication, your wheelchair, your oxygen …your heart still manages almost ten percent? "-" Everything comes along!"-" But what does he say about it up there?“I leaked it, that I had my doubts about the action. “He agrees with everything, and understand, I don't want to die here. Didi mediated between the heavenly whispers of light and God. I come to the brightest and highest heaven, there I have my golden carriage, my house and a paradise garden …“I was a little disappointed with this weird one, slimy Didi, but when I saw with what devotion Lina hugged him goodbye, a lot was clearer to me.
The project then fell through. Lina's health deteriorated from Saturday night to Sunday. She lay in her bed gasping and tight. Even the Coca Cola I brought with me couldn't cheer her up.
Towards afternoon there was a knock at the door and the matron poked her head in. “Ah, there you are, Sister Lina. We missed you at devotion this morning ….You will be there in the evening?“-“ Good morning Sister Hanni, What is she saying?“Lina's hand went to the hearing aid behind her left ear. “Unfortunately I can only understand you poorly, sister. Unfortunately I misplaced my hearing aid. May I introduce to you, this is Jeanne, the fine, all too fine daughters of the great Ursina Stürmchen, I operated on over in the eye clinic in the seventies under excellent conditions …“The superior smiled weakly and shook hands with me, she also took a look at Lina's hearing aid. “The hearing aid is in your ear, Sister Lina!" - "What is she saying?“Lina gave me a piercing look. “That you don't misplace the hearing aid, but on your head. ”-“ Oh yes, that's true, I just don't hear anything, Sister Hanni! Can you please get yourself back again?" - "I have said, that we missed you at morning prayer. We can count on you tonight?“Lina pulled the hearing aid from behind her ear and stored it in her Bible compartment. „So“, she said petulantly. “Now you can talk to me.” After the superior disappeared, Lina fell back into her brooding stupidity. I knew it, that her failed escape from the deaconess house bothered her. She wanted to get away from this place, but was too sick to be transported. It was too late to break out, that she had secretly longed for all her life. And on that fact she chewed and chewed it, while she sipped her Coca Cola!
Hello Linchen, would you feel like it today, with me for a jump in the park? We could use the wheelchair for once, what do you mean?” Thunderstorm. Of course, Lina didn't want to go to the park in her wheelchair. Better over her body than in a wheelchair. In this resolution Lina remained firm. "No, dear Finöggeli. I'm tired and I'll stay in bed. "
How Lina died, I do not know. As far as I've heard, she is on the roof terrace before she dies, because they necessarily made the solar lamp out of clay, that I gave her for her ninety-fifth birthday, wanted to bring to light. In the winter months the LED light next to her bed hadn't been able to shine enough. Now, in May it would be possible, to collect the daylight. Lina walked without a buck and without a rollator and without oxygen hoses, dressed only in nylon socks and a skirt on the roof. She looked for the brightest cone of light for her lamp and then she is, when she wanted to go back to the elevator, Fell over the terrace step. Even as a young girl, Lina had been crooked when walking because of her slight hump on the right. This imbalance had intensified in recent years. Lina broke her collarbone in her fall, and so she lay between the terrace and the house all night. As found the next morning, that she was absent from roll call again, the sisters rumor mill started to simmer. Lina had been kidnapped by an obscure sect after all! A young man had made her cheat! In her sick days she was out of the once most solid, strongest and by far the happiest sister Lina became a pathetic and confused sinner, who had traded the revelation of Jesus Christ for an ominous spiritual whimsy.
Night Nurse Kernen almost tripped over her. “Sister Lina, can you hear me!“, she asked. “Because I heard, that you don't just have an ominous hearing aid, but also ominous ears. ”Lina didn't answer anything. Aber ist dies wichtig? After all, she heard everything with her heart.
(2012/19)