Special piece of furniture

The brown canapé in our kitchen

A brown "canapé" - author Robert Schneider remembers.

(Bild: Sammlung Franz Beer, Stadtarchiv Dornbirn)

Author Robert Schneider remembers a very special piece of furniture - and the unannounced guest "Ziwui".

For years, there was a brown canapé in our kitchen with a floral fabric pattern on which the under-springing was already showing through. That's how worn it was. That's why my mother placed white decorative doilies on the areas where the fabric was most worn. Over the years, there were more and more doilies until my mother finally decided to cover the sofa completely with a thick woolen blanket. That was the custom back then. A new cover or even replacing the entire upholstery would simply have been too expensive. It was the generation that didn't throw anything away.

When the first furniture stores appeared in this country, my father was talked into buying an incredibly ugly, clunky, cream-green upholstered couch, which he immediately covered with old, completely discordant blankets when it was delivered. The couch was to last for generations. It was intended as an heirloom. After all, you only buy such expensive furniture once in a lifetime.

Cluttered with school and toys

I rarely saw my father resting on the brown canapé in the kitchen. When I was little, he often lay there. After lunch. For ten minutes. Then he was off to the field again. Most of the time it stood there unused or was littered with our schoolwork and toys. How often did my mother threaten: "I'll throw everything out of the window now!" She never did, but quietly put it away when we were asleep.

It was the time when front doors were still unlocked. Even at night. It was like that in the whole village. In summer, they were left wide open. Nobody would have thought of locking doors. Maybe because everyone had the same amount or the same little.

As my parents ran a small general store, there was always a lot going on. There were no business hours back then. You just popped in and picked up what you needed or had forgotten in the "land down under" when you went bulk shopping. At the most ungodly hour, someone could suddenly be standing in the kitchen. My mother would immediately drop everything, open the creaky door to the general store and serve the customers. She loved her little "Lädele", and at the end of the month, when she did the bookkeeping in the kitchen next to the brown canapé on a huge yellow writing pad, she was blissfully happy.

Author Robert Schneider remembers a very special piece of furniture

(Bild: Mathis Fotografie)

It was an incredibly sultry summer night. Back then, summers were either completely rainy or endlessly humid. I was lying in bed and couldn't sleep because of the heat. My back was burning from a severe sunburn I had caught while haymaking. I tossed and turned while my brother snored peacefully to himself. I got up and crept down the groaning wooden stairs to the kitchen, doing my best not to make any noise. In the kitchen, I wanted to take a tea towel, wet it and then place it on my burning shoulder blades for relief. I didn't turn on the light so that I wouldn't wake anyone. Suddenly I heard breathing. It was more of a snort than breathing. My heart slipped into my pants. There was no doubt about it. There was someone in the kitchen. Although it was pitch black, I could make out a shadow on the sofa. A complete stranger was crouched there, sleeping, or so it seemed. It smelled of tobacco and alcohol. I didn't dare turn on the kitchen light, stole away as quietly as possible, crawled under the covers with my brother and even forgot about my sunburn out of sheer fear. My brother groaned briefly, rolled over and continued snoring.
I didn't make it the last few meters
In the morning, things became clearer. I hadn't slept a wink and was therefore the first to go into the kitchen. Then I recognized the stranger on the sofa. It was the "Ziwui", as he was called in the village. A woodcutter from Tyrol who helped with the forest work with Haflinger horses a few houses away. The "Ziwui" was a single, amiable old man with a full bald head, a pointed chin and an equally pointed nose. He had a wooden leg, which he always dragged. He said "Zwiui!" about every tenth step, which is how he got his nickname. When he talked, I could hardly understand a word he said. He mumbled and had no teeth left in his mouth. But when he talked about his childhood in Kössen in Kaiserwinkl, you could tell by the way his watery blue eyes began to sparkle. He was incredibly homesick, which is why he often drank to excess. And so it happened that he couldn't make the last few hundred meters to the neighbor's house, entered our kitchen in the middle of the night and lay down on the brown canapé to sleep.

My parents let him do it because, unlike me, they knew how lost "Ziwui" really was and what terrible things he had seen and experienced during the war. They didn't ban him from the house or drive him out. Today, they would immediately call the police or sue for trespassing. Sometimes he stayed until breakfast, drank a bowl of malt coffee and dipped a piece of white bread into it. His watery blue eyes would light up when he ate plaited bread.

Ziwui" was never a burden to us. He usually just lay on the sofa for an hour or two and then slipped away as silently as he had come. He never took anything, and he always smoothed out the crocheted doilies on the sofa. He probably often slept in our kitchen and we never noticed him coming or going. He just wanted to take a rest from life. He managed that on the brown canapé. Then he left again and probably said "Ziwui!" after every tenth step.