Windmill Fair · Das Fest des Windrads

Man, woman, and mid-life crisis in the heart of the Austrian countryside

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

"… a carnival of tragicomedy… verbally extremely creative destruction… an entirely new narrative tone has been struck between superficially light lifestyle themes and classic Austrian grouchiness."

Jan Wiele, FAZ

"A novel comprising equal parts mirth and quiet desperation from the depths of the Austrian countryside. Isabella Straub endows her characters with the light of laughter and reflected in that a dignity that raises them above their peculiar suffering."

Burkhard Müller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Breakneck comedy and delightfully sharp-tongued provincial farce"

Peter Meisenberg, WDR 5

"Subtle, sideways humour"

Cornelia Geissler, Berliner Zeitung

"deliciously absurd… a verbal delight“

Stefanie Theile, Stern viva!

"Light on its feet, eloquent, amusing. Rewarding!"

Gregor Auenhammer, Der Standard

"A contemporary critique positioned highly originally and very skilfully between tragedy and comedy"

Marianne Fischer, Kleine Zeitung

"Grotesque, amusing and sophisticated… A book about modern working life, about provincial life, consolation, dignity, rivalry, love and despair, consistently intelligent und witty."

Rudolf Kraus, Bücherschau

"Following on from her well-received debut Südbalkon, Austrian author Isabella Straub has produced another book that's easy to recommend. She skilfully weaves together the stories of two people in the midst of a mid-life crisis and tells a tale of failures, of wrong decisions, but also of hope. Life as seen through an honest, unsentimental lens, with humour as deftly used as it is subtle."

Die Presse

"Humour that hits the spot"

Maria Motter, FM4

"As in her debut, Südbalkon, the modern world of work looms large in Das Fest des Windrads. Viennese writer Isabella Straub has written herself into the first rank of Austrian authors with her linguistic dexterity and a comedic touch that doesn't miss."

Tyrolia Buch-Blog

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High-flying manager Greta and taxi driver Jurek couldn't be more different. Yet both have the same problem: the midlife blues. When Greta is stranded in Jurek's village after her train breaks down, it's not the beginning of a grand love affair, but a long overdue meeting not with a stranger, but with the self. 

Windmill Fair is a novel about the trials and tribulations of daily life, the fragility of career aspirations, and the search for the right life in (supposedly) the wrong place.

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Windmill Fair

pp.7-21

ISABELLA STRAUB

Windmill Fair

I

Everything depends on the first sentence. Greta leaned back against the headrest. The train raced and rumbled urgently onward – firssst sssen-tence, firssst sssen-tence, firssst sssen-tence. The window projected an aura of stickiness inside and out, and if she had the choice she wouldn’t have touched a thing on this train, not the armrest, not her seat’s questionably-stained upholstery, not the greasy handle on the compartment’s sliding door. 

She pictured Vittorio Fras in front of her, how he spread his arms, boomed “Mia cara Greta,” kissed her on the cheek. A false kiss from pursed lips. He would place his hand on her hip and press her against his chest, whisper sour piggish nothings in her ear, she would react by pushing him away, as if it were a game, and she would force herself to say “Vittorio” in the sweetest voice she could muster. Mio caro Vito. After all, life is a question of surmounting obstacles. 

She stared at the graffito that was the QR code on her ticket and asked herself what the conductor would do with it. Scan it? Punch a hole in it? Stamp it? She couldn’t remember the last time she had taken the train, it must have been decades ago. 

Greta had hoped to find an open carriage, but here she was in a compartment sandwiched between an old man and a callow youth who both started unpacking their lunches almost as soon as the train had left the station. When she looked up, it was to see slabs of brown bread the size of bootsoles disappearing into each man’s mouth, foregoing any intermediary stage of mastication. Nausea struck instantly. Watching other people eat gave Greta the horrors.

One of them appeared to be a student. He was wearing John Lennon glasses and balancing a laptop on his knees. The other had a round, smooth face; only the deep bags under his eyes betrayed his age. Shimmering blue, they arched outwards like two small balconies retrofitted to his face to lend it an air of dignity and gravitas.

When she arrived in San Marino, Vittorio Fras would take her to dinner; there was no escaping it. His invitation on the phone had come as such a shock that she forgot to say no. If she had understood correctly, the reservation had already been made, at Medusa in the Piazza della Libertà.

Greta would bite the bullet of a chewing Vittorio and focus exclusively on the fine details: on his silver cufflinks, initialled V and F, on the unusually long hairs on the back of his hands, on the sharp contours that defined his receding hairline. And she would wait for the news that would taste sweeter than any crème brûlée: that he was overjoyed to tell her that as of now, she was the manager of the new superdepartment for flexible and rigid endoscopes. She, Greta Kaminsky, equipped with a silky smooth tongue, and a willingness to throw herself once more unto the breach for the good of the company.

For an announcement like that he could eat whatever he damn well pleased: scampi, and fried rucola that would stick between his teeth; he could guzzle down tripe, liver, brain, kidneys, tongue; and for dessert the entire herd of mousses, from pistachio to cinnamon to coconut. She would beam at him all the while, whether he chewed with his mouth closed or not. 

“How will you break the news to your colleagues, my dear?” he would ask, after he had been provided with his little box of toothpicks, or another glass of Château Latour. 

“Everything depends on the first sentence,” she would say, for there could have been little else she had poured so much intellectual energy into. If you have to tell your co-workers that you are no longer one of them, but rather their boss, you must wield your words as carefully as a surgeon their scalpel. The first sentence can leave a trail of devastation in its wake, confidence can drain away – a bright future cast into shadow. Of course, Fras would mention ‘special measures’. A reorganisation of this kind is never unaccompanied by ‘measures’. More than one of Greta’s erstwhile colleagues would soon be fetching their coffee from a dispenser in the job centre. Now, that wasn’t a particularly nice thought, but at the end of the day she wasn’t being paid to be nice, that would be Fras’ contribution. “Sensitivity, my dear,” he would say, patting her hand. “That is what counts.” He would remind her of Wendelin Hufnagel’s fate, although the reminder would be completely superfluous, she thought about it often enough. 

In his first missive following his promotion, Hufnagl had impressed upon the entire workforce that they were no longer on first-name terms. His exact words had been: “Esteemed Colleagues! Please do not be upset, but from today I am MISTER Hufnagl” – the ‘Mr’ spat there in block capitals. Of course, everyone was upset, and Hufnagl, who was convinced that he had proceeded with the greatest sensitivity, felt misunderstood by the world, or vice versa. “I can rely on you at least, can’t I?” he said to Greta, intimating that he wished to remain, with her anyway, on the same basis of communicative equality they had always enjoyed. Alas, having unscrewed his old head and replaced it overnight with the new thin-lipped, haughty-eyed Boss™ model, he had already lost Greta too, however garish the neckties he used to distract from the thread spiralling up his neck.

The first sentence, Greta thought, the first sentence grabs their sympathy. Always. She rummaged inside her bag and pulled out her hotel reservation - the Superior Suite in Hotel Farinelli, with luxury minibar – and noted down the words ALL IN IT TOGETHER, TEAM PLAYER, and RECYCLING THE BALL. She liked a sports metaphor. She scribbled MANAGER and BUY IN underneath. 

That was what it was all about, after all: everyone hitting the same note, everyone on the same page; everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, in fact. A hymn, Greta thought, a hymn. 

Obviously, only those capable of hitting the right notes would be able to sing along. That would be her first task: to listen closely. To rally the talented singers around her. 

She sensed eyes on her, feeling her out, and when she raised her gaze it met the watery-blue irises of the bags-under-his-eyes man. He was holding an opened packet of wafers out for her; she raised her hand to parry.

“Eat something, Miss, a bite to eat never hurt anyone!” he said, waggling the wafers in front of her face. She could smell the hazelnut and chocolate filling, and she could smell something else as well, on the man’s hand, which was dotted with nicotine stains and tipped with tattered fingernails. Greta stood up and whispered: “No, no thank you.” She hurdled the student’s legs, which he hadn’t cared to move out of the way, and braced herself against the bar of the luggage rack. 

She opened the compartment door; a uniformed colossus blocked her escape. 

“New passenger?” 

What a question, Greta thought. Everybody was a new passenger, no one spent the night on the train. Wordlessly, she showed him her ticket and looked at his uniform, regalia that had absconded from the costume department. 

His large hands shook as he bent over the ticket like an archaeologist examining a rare find. He traced the lines with his fingers, his lips formed words. Once he had found what he was looking for, he started tapping in slow motion on the device slung around his neck. One got the impression that he was doing it for the very first time. 

Finally, he cancelled the ticket with his old-fashioned ticket punch. Then he wished her a pleasant journey, she mumbled “You too” and wished that he would finally let her past, yet he didn’t budge an inch. He just stood there, tugging nervously on his moustache. 

“It’s never a pleasant journey. Not for me. Every day, Villach and back,” he said. “Every day, Miss. I know every leaf on every tree. You could tip me out of bed on the platform at St Egyd and I could tell you exactly where I was: St Egyd. You could blindfold me in Vienna and I could tell you in Bruck an der Mur: we’re in Bruck an der Mur. Throw me off the train anywhere on the line and I could tell you to the metre how far it is to the next station.”

Greta, who was starting to worry that he wouldn’t stop until he had listed every single station from Vienna to Klagenfurt, said: “I’m very sorry about that,” although that was the wrong answer. Compassion was not to be wasted, everyone is master of their own destiny. Her parents had chosen to be teachers, poured themselves heart and soul into educating the nation’s children, and she had decided to take a position at MEDICALUX following her amicable departure from Bernstein Healthy Products. The story had hit the papers, a unique synthesis of bullying and stalking, which Greta’s therapist had dubbed ‘stabbing’. But that was all a long time ago now. A-go, a-go, a-go, the train murmured beneath Greta’s feet. 

A few passengers were still looking for somewhere to sit, opening compartment doors, closing them again in disappointment, their luggage trundling at their heels like faithful hounds. 

“My father was a train dispatcher!” the conductor called after her, “Ragossnig, Peter Ragossnig!” as if that should have meant something to her. And Greta really did start wondering if she had ever heard of a Peter Ragossnig, although she had no idea what a train dispatcher even did. 

This is what it must feel like to live in exile, Greta thought, and felt like replying to the conductor: “I’m not supposed to be here. It’s all a big misunderstanding, I should have been in San Marino a long time ago.” A completely laughable statement. So she just stood there and kept her mouth shut.

Greta had in fact been working on the assumption that Naomi had reserved the BMW for her. After all, everyone had known that she was going to the expo in San Marino and was already running late, because she had arranged a final meeting with the booth designer. Her place wasn’t staggering along this draughty corridor, tossed from one side to the other; her place was in a beige leather cocoon, embraced in a seat that fit her like a glove. 

Greta recalled how astonished she had been when the secretary greeted her that morning with the words: “The BMW is in the garage.” Ok, Greta, thought, then I’ll fly. “Which gate?” she asked, yet Naomi merely shrugged. “Flights were booked out. I’ve printed out a train ticket for you.” 

Train ticket. A concept absent from Greta’s active vocabulary. This has to be a joke, she thought. Any moment now they’ll all burst out of the woodwork, laughing themselves half to death. They’ve probably caught wind of the promotion. A send-off surprise with prosecco and salmon canapés. Greta waited, but nothing happened. With a terrible serenity, Naomi took a piece of paper from the printer’s output tray. 

“Platform 23,” she said. “No reception. You’ll be lucky to make it, to be honest.”

“Shit,” Greta said under her breath. “What a mess.”

For weeks, everyone had been preparing for the expo in San Marino. Björn and Martina had gone on ahead and were already plundering the mini bar in Hotel Farinelli, while she was lumped with rushing to the station and finding platform 23. Nothing more than a wrinkle, she said to herself, a meaningless, trifling delay, not a disaster by any means. This is not a disaster. She would arrive in San Marino a little later than planned, that was all, miss the first day of the expo, but she would be fully prepared for dinner with Fras in the evening.  

Greta had been working for MEDICALUX for three years, and if she was perfectly honest with herself the company headquarters on the outskirts of Vienna had been a major factor in her decision. The monumental building – a multi-coloured higgledypiggle of cubes designed by a Dutch architectural collective – had impressed her far more than the interview with the board. The building radiated a sense of lightness and ease that had been absent at her previous workplace. 

MEDICALUX manufactured endoscopes, tubes that made it possible to look inside the human body, a precise, hygienically irreproachable area of activity that was an unqualified boon for mankind. Greta would often say to close friends: “It’s the opposite of astronomy. You look inward, not outward. And when you get really deep inside, it looks really far out. We have a universe inside of us.” Although she had moved into an office on the marketing floor, she soon found herself spending more time with her colleagues in sales. Thanks to Greta’s strategic thinking, MEDICALUX had been able to bag two large hospital groups as customers, including the prestigious Magenbuch Clinic. Hufnagl announced it in the auditorium during the Christmas party. Everyone had come, even Engineering and IT, who usually formed a world of their own. Instead, they formed a semicircle around the plastic Christmas tree, and when Hufnagl raised a glass to her she forced a smile.

Hufnagl said: “I hope you’ll be part of our family for a long time to come.” Family. The whispered clunk of plastic champagne flutes tapping was pathetic. 

Greta unzipped her handbag, yellow calf leather, and checked the contents of the side compartment. There should be at least one example from each folder, one flexible and one stiff endoscope, as well as a complete product catalogue and a history of MEDICALUX. We light up your life – that was the slogan. And that was exactly what the company had done for Greta: her life had been much brighter since she left Bernstein Healthy Products. 

She squinted at her phone, which was ensconced in the side pocket of her Max Mara bag. 

Three miscalls.

Björn.

Björn.

Björn.

Björn never called. He’d rather chop his right arm off than ask her for help. 

“Hallo?”

Greta pressed the phone to her ear. The connection whistled and crackled. She could make out the words ‘manager’ and ‘walls’. “Too narrow,” Björn said. “Walls… don’t fit.”

“Damn.”

She had gone over a new concept for the booth with the designer – airier, lighter, more open. The news obviously hadn’t reached Björn and Martina. Two neutral panels for the video projector, the bar in front, and the presentation table in the middle. Lounge chairs scattered decoratively across their display. White orchids on low tables, hostesses wearing jeans and white slogan t-shirts: We light up your life. Lighting was provided by flexible endoscopes repurposed into lamps – a stunt with which she had already caused a furore at the medical equipment expo in Ravenna, and even bagged some column inches. 

She’d lost reception. Greta pressed the phone against her forehead, closed her eyes. Why oh why had she accepted the train ticket? She should have insisted on flying. Show no weakness. 

She thought of Diana, Diana Birkmeier, head of sales, on sick leave for the past three months. Burnout. But now even supermarket shelf stackers had burnout, it just didn’t cut it anymore, it was a joke. Diagnostic proletisation. Officially, Diana had a pulmonary embolism, in reality she was staying at the “Burnout Oasis BTL”, obviously a clinic for psychosomatic illnesses. They hadn’t exchanged a word for three weeks, not a peep. 

“BTL, what does that stand for?” Greta had asked. “Not the sandwich?” Her colleagues merely laughed. “By The Lake,” one of them answered. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? A burnout oasis needs a water supply.”

Greta wrote a message to Diana on her phone. “We all miss you. On the way to San Marino.” She had heard that Diana sat in the only chair in her room and stared at the poplar outside her window. That tree in front of the window, so Greta had been told anyway, was the only scrap of greenery the place had to offer. To calm the nerves. 

“I sometimes wish I had that too,” Greta had said. “A poplar of my own to look at.” An idiotic remark, one designed to draw attention away from the fact that to this day she still had not visited Diana. Greta’s greatest fear was to be infected with chronic hopelessness. There were days, when she shrugged on her lace slip in the morning, that she became painfully aware that her carefree life had an expiration date, and that she couldn’t afford to take her foot off the gas, not even for a second. 

II

A momentary dizzy spell. Nothing even worth thinking about. Jurek let the water flow, propping himself with both hands against the sink before removing his toothbrush from the glass, filling it, and watching the two tablets hiss into dissolution. He emptied it in one swig. Then he soaked one of the guest towels and wrapped it around his neck. Glance in the mirror. He pulled up his boxer shorts by the waistband, stuck out his shoulders, slapped his belly button with the flat of his hand. The flesh underneath his fingers shuddered. 

He sat down to pee. Theoretically he could stand if he wanted to, there was no one there to stop him. He bent down and reached for the newspaper that had been lying next to the bathtub for days. It had got wet and dried out again, the pages were stiff. His belly rested on his thighs, warm and soft, as he flicked through the paper. A photograph caught his attention, an ageing Hollywood star posing on the red carpet with his girlfriend. The actor’s cheeks looked like drum leather that had been stretched too tight. Jurek probed his own cheek with his tongue. 

He got dressed. First, socks pulled up to his knees, then the shirt, then the trousers. Let’s try tightening the belt a notch, maybe he could get one over on his waistline.

I need to start exercising, he thought. 

Slip on the loafers, the brown ones. Flexible soles, comfy as slippers. Onto the balcony now, lighting a Marlboro on the way. No smoking indoors, that was his iron rule. He sucked it down and released the smoke in a staccato. 

The sky was colourless. Jurek looked across to the Rosenstein’s. Lawn trimmed with nail scissors. Box clipped into duck shape. Flowers, whose names he had long forgotten, withered in heart-shaped beds. Miriam had known all the names, she had been his guide to nature, but Miriam had left him, and she had taken more than just the names of the flowers in the Rosenstein’s garden with her.

Jurek crushed the cigarette end on the concrete. His parents’ house, which he had moved into after their deaths, was still a work in progress. At first he had enjoyed seeing the bare bricks that emphasised the house’s structure, like a body with the skin peeled off. He had joined forces with the house. Once he finished the job, he would decide to stay in End once and for all. Its unfinished state was a guarantee that he was free and could leave at any time. 

Rosenstein was heading to his carport like he did every morning, footfalls light as a feather, mouth half open, total concentration. Jurek looked down at Rosenstein’s bald head, the lizard face with the long nose, the black framed glasses. Jurek knew that Rosenstein would look up at him at any moment, an old ritual, a connection. Jurek raised a hand, ready. 

“This evening,” Rosenstein called up to him. “Don’t forget!”

This evening? As he closed the balcony door, he remembered. He had bumped into Danielle at the bottle bank and she had invited him to a party. “Very relaxed,” she had said to a soundtrack of breaking glass: “Don’t worry, just a few friends.”

He asked himself what that was supposed to mean. He wasn’t worrying. Since the divorce she had treated him differently, as if he was suffering from some mysterious illness that prevented him from socialising. As if some crucial inner cog were irreparably broken. 

Of course, he had forgotten to ask if they were celebrating a birthday. Trying to find the right birthday present had always been pure torture. 

He hadn’t got a clue what other people might like. Miriam had kept a drawer just for gifts, filled to the brim with wrapping paper. She wrapped a present as if she were preparing haute cuisine. In her eyes, it wasn’t worth giving to anyone until it was perfectly wrapped and decorated with glitter and bows. Miriam would stare down and shame any recipient who didn’t have the nerve to tear open her masterpiece in front of her. Jurek had never been able to understand it – why all the fuss was so important to her.

Jurek decided to take a bottle of wine to the Rosenstein’s. You can’t go wrong with wine. And the Rosensteins were fanatical wine drinkers. The labels, and the sheer number of the bottles that Danielle shoved into the bottle bank left no doubt about that. Twice a year they visited a whole series of wineries, returning to End fully laden with bottles. Jurek had never shaken the impression that the trips were undertaken solely to provide them with a healthy cellar of anecdotes. 

Everything Jurek needed for the day was lying on the sideboard in the hall: hand cream, a blister pack of painkillers, sunglasses, keys, diary, mobile. Three miscalls. 

Joe.

Joe.

Joe.

Jurek’s Don’t Do list was pinned up next to a picture of his parents when they were young – somewhere by the sea, his mother’s eyes bright with happiness. It reminded him of the things he was to avoid at all costs.

Pets (even small ones)

Fitness-E

Romcoms

Drink-E e.g. house parties 

ONS (with Enders)

The ‘E’ stood for ‘Excess’.

© Isabella Straub 2015, translation Bryn Roberts 2016