Uncle Golo was a deeply religious man. Unfortunately, it had a visible flaw: Uncle Golo's upper shovel teeth protruded so far, that he never succeeded, to close the mouth over these teeth.
Because Uncle Golo's teeth were sticking out like that, they usually hooked into the bulging lower lip like two long, sharp files. Sometimes, when Uncle Golo stayed silent for a long time or fell asleep, his lips were bleeding from the pressure of the digging teeth, without, that he noticed something of it. Between the two angled, Sharp-edged shovel teeth Golos also gaped a huge gap.
Without the flaw in his teeth, Uncle Golo would no doubt have been a very handsome man. He had thick, indomitable curls, deeply tanned skin from many mountaineering and black melancholy eyes, who winked and flickered wildly, as soon as Uncle Golo felt addressed.
At least we children thought Uncle Golo was the funniest of our acquaintances. No visit passed, by not luring him away from his parents within five minutes, to do his hair in our playroom or to give him a dress made of old umbrella skins or newspapers. We were happy to lock him and animal in the shaft above the boiler room and feed him with homemade grass altar, we left him howling long enough afterwards. In contrast to our ragged father, Golo was as tame as a horse, and just let everything go with you.
If only it hadn't been the problem, that he always fell asleep! For example, if we didn't wag around Uncle Golo's chair after lunch, our parents disappeared into the kitchen, suddenly his face fell forward, the mouth opened and the eyes closed. It was amazing, that someone, who just giggled to the bet with us was simply gone from one second to the other, and all this while sitting at a dining table!
If you were an adult, you probably had two questions on your lips when you saw Uncle Golo, first: Why did Uncle Golo lose his teeth?, which some took for a dummy from the carnival store, not judge, Secondly: But why was Uncle Golo always tired??
By the way, we knew, that Uncle Golo has a strange job, called career counselors, exercised, like climbing a mountain with ice ax and crampons and being something of a "widower". We ourselves had Uncle Golo's late wife, Marielouisa, never seen her face and only knew her face from the photos of our baptisms, one of which shows Marielouisa's face as a woman of about twenty-two. In this photo, Marielouisa has plunged her forehead into countless lines of emotion and worry and is holding a small white bundle in her arms. Apparently she is not aware of it, that she is photographed, because her gaze wanders far beyond the camera into an intense distance, which can be either human or the distant itself.
Mother once told me, that Marielouisa woke up from days of unconsciousness and without pain on the last day of her young life, which was destroyed by cancer, that they had been consuming for months, got out of bed. With full consciousness, she crossed the room and looked briefly out of the open window. Then she lay back in bed and fell asleep, enraptured, almost happy.
Because Uncle Golo was pretty much alone after Marielouisa's death, he sometimes visited us on vacation in the mountains, so also in the Dischma valley. We were there in a small hut, hidden in the forest, at the back of the vertical slope at the foot of the scalett maple and were almost impossible to find. But for Uncle Golo we made a sign out of two old shoe soles, painted them yellow and labeled them with our names. So that Golo could find us too, we put the signpost on a broomstick in the grass down at the valley exit.
When Golo came to us for two days in mid-June, did it snow. Golo had found the way to the hut. Masses of snow dripped from his shirt, his legs were wrapped in white sleeves up to below the knees. We chased Golo out of the hut through the blowing snow to the well, where we got cold water, to make a hot bath for him in the tin tub in the hut over the fire. Later we rolled curlers in his wet hair in the cow pasture behind the hut, me on one side of his head, my sister to the other. While my sister finished putting on her curlers, when the June sun penetrated through the clouds again, I wasn't finished shooting Bigoudi when it got dark. Golo slept quietly and peacefully while sitting on a taburette.
What exactly was Uncle Golo's belief in?, Incidentally, Uncle Golo never said a word about it. However, we never asked about it. For us, Uncle Golo's depth of faith was the way, how he reacted to us and always made us feel one hundred percent, we are the greatest kids, that existed. Maybe this depth of faith depended on it, we found, also somehow related to his strange attacks of microsleep. Although it was us after all, that got him out of sleep again, which sometimes moved him to tears.
Nonetheless, after about ten years, Uncle Golo got married. Christine, who was also deeply religious, wore a gray pantsuit with a gray page hairstyle at her wedding and never laughed a single time. While Uncle Golo thanked us for the marriage congratulations with a few reserved words, his wife didn't say a single sentence to us. After all, we weren't in a religious association!
In about eighth grade my mother drove me to Uncle Golo's career counseling. Uncle Golo greeted me formally and laid out small slide photos in front of me, representing various occupations. Neither Uncle Golo nor I looked at each other. Still, I thought about Uncle Golo's teeth, instead of focusing on the pictures with the jobs. Uncle Golo's teeth were still protruding that far, that he couldn't shut his mouth about it. Still, they somehow seemed a bit smaller and not that powerful, as I remembered her. Or was that just the memory and therefore the childhood perspective, that made those teeth seem so powerful?
The last time, when we saw Uncle Golo, war, when he and Christine invited us for brunch. As soon as everyone was seated at the table, Golo and Christine folded their hands in prayer and invited us, to do the same. Then they closed their eyes. My parents, my sister and I bowed our heads, yet when i its toneless, cold voice heard, I started up again. „Herr, show us your way, that we walk in your truth, keep our hearts pure, bless our table community and everything, what we receive through your great goodness, through Christ, our Lord. Amen.“
(22.11.19)