Once upon a time – Short stories from the Sixties

Franz Kellner

by Franz Kellner

Story

I go for a walk with my mother on the Ring Street in Vienna on Sunday. We are approached by a young rural woman with a sad expression on her face. She asks for a train station and mentions that she needs money for a train ticket. My mother first had the idea of sending her to the station mission. But finally decides to give the young woman, who was obviously tricked and abandoned and now simply wants to go home, 100 shillings for the ticket. The young woman is overjoyed, almost crying, asks for the address and promises to send the 100 shillings by postal order next week. My mother trusts her, the amount is also a lot of money for her. She doesn’t ask for a name or address. In fact, the following week the postal order with 100 shillings arrives.

Sunday walks with my mother and one of her female friends were usually the most boring thing I remembered from my childhood. Traditionally, I always had to put on my Sunday suit. That’s why I couldn’t play on any playground, if we might come across one. The suit should not get dirty. Luckily there was sometimes a bit of unexpected variety. We were caught in the rain and tried to get home quickly. Suddenly I said, “Look mom, there’s something shiny on the bottom.” It was an intact, beautiful lady watch. It functioned for several years and my mother was very happy about it.

Sometimes we visited friends in Burgenland. Some lived in a village near the Hungarian border. Basically, my mother never allowed me to run far ahead of her side. She always worried about that. I saw a tower far off the path we were walking with mother’s friends. Curious, I ran towards it and my mother followed in panic. She looked very worried and said “You’ll never do that again”. At the time, of course, I had no idea that this was a border tower on the “Iron Curtain”.

My mother loved to visit pilgrimage churches. Since we both came from the Waldviertel, Maria Taferl was a popular destination. When we went there for the first time, my mother said, “When you visit Maria Taferl for the first time, you can make a wish and it will come true. She obviously believed in it and as a child I thought about my wishes: To be rich? Always be healthy? To go to heaven? I chosed heaven in the end, even though I had to wait a long time. There might be something true in a child’s belief.

© Franz Kellner 2023-01-26

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