Josef Winkler: The serf (excerpt in English)

The serf

The summer visitors and foreigners, as we used to call the holidaymakers when we were children, want neither modern washing facilities nor television sets in the rooms they rent in the farmhouses; they want to see a mounted stag’s head hanging in the corner of the farmhouse parlor, or a stuffed eagle on the wall, and there should be a stuffed fox in the hall, raising its paw to indicate the bathroom where, under the shower, stands a TV set that has no picture, but gives out a constant crackling. They want to have a hand-carved cradle in their room in which they can keep their city brat for the duration of their stay and tuck it in with corn dolls. And if, in their room, there is a hand-carved cradle full of succulents growing in soil from the grave of a village child who was suffocated by gases from a silo, then they’re happy with that too.

Translated by Michael Mitchell
(source: Vilenica Almanac 2021)