Venus of Willendorf

When I was a child, my mother would tell us stories about people like us, but not quite, who lived along the banks of the prehistoric Danube. They stood shorter than us, with their thick brows and barrel chests against the Ice Age cold. Did they speak like us, I wondered; had my ancestors looked into their eyes and seen intelligence there, or a dullness like an animal’s? Theirs was a world of intractable forest, split only by the great arterial rivers on which our ancestors – their rivals – sailed their canoes. My mother longed to go to the dig sites along the river, but half lay behind the Iron Curtain, and half beyond an even more insurmountable wall: three children and a mortgage to pay. But the names were enough to paint that vanished world: Aurignacian; Dolni Vestonice. Pestera. Willendorf. Years later, my mother flew to meet me in Bratislava. She touched the window as the train started for Vienna, saying “All this was there all along.” She meant the murals of strapping workers, the fields, and the factories alike. In the Naturhistorisches Museum we huddled around the spotlit Venus of Willendorf. She was forty thousand years old, my mother whispered to me. There had been hands that had held that little statue, I thought. They had judged the right angle to strike the mammoth ivory. They had appraised it with eyes that saw art, just as I did, in the swell of the statue’s knees, in her exaggerated proportions. Gazing at the statue, I found I was thinking about that vanished world again. The same pair of hands that had carved the Venus had also touched the rough bark of trees long dead, and scooped up water from a Danube both like and unlike the one that I crossed on my commute every day. Their eyes had seen blue skies devoid of jet trails, and nights so abundantly starry that they could hunt by that light alone. And perhaps they had seen our cousins, the other people, now only a ghost in our DNA. My mother and I murmured to one another in low voices, marvelling at the complexity of the headdress, the smoothness of the legs. Marvelling at the fact that after so many years, my mother was here, and that we would shortly take a train over the ghost of the Iron Curtain to those dig sites. And behind us, a couple on a day trip from Brno grew impatient.