A Life in Two-Week Portions

Text: Franziska Smolnik, Berlin
Photographs: Barbara Schick, Berlin

The simple Madonna stands right next to the bulky TV. It’s her usual place. Zuzana rests herself on her double bed, takes the remote control and switches on the evening’s programme. It’s news time. Zuzana stares at the newscaster, soundlessly repeating the words just heard. Every once in a while she turns her head over to the little Madonna, her eyes resting there for little while, then she turns her attention back to the pictures on the TV screen. Carefully listening to the newsreader, she doesn’t miss a word, and keeps quietly articulating them for herself.

Photo gallery

After a day full of work and 12 hours of constant company Zuzana finally got to rest in her room, which once belonged to her employer’s daughter. Surrounding her is typical teenage furniture, cat posters and a cat pet collection. Sitting there all by herself, Zuzana starts feeling a little lonely. Her thoughts then drift to Slovakia, to her teenage son Vladko, her husband and her grown-up daughter. “When I look at my little statue though, for me, they are not that far away”, Zuzana explains. In the struggle against loneliness, the Madonna’s powers also get support from modern communication technologies: every day Vladko sends her messages to her cell-phone; the one-time telephone ringing means that her daughter, who is currently working as a waitress near Rimini, is thinking of her.

Zuzana is working as a personal nurse in Austria. For two weeks in a row she lives together with her patient, an elderly man with Parkinson’s disease, providing 24 hour care, 7 days a week. After her two-week shift she gets two weeks off, which she always spends with her family in a small town in Western Slovakia. When her break is over, she returns to her Austrian job. Zuzana has been living her life in two week portions for a year now. Twelve months ago, she registered with a Slovak agency, which then placed her, via an Austrian partner agency, in the Steiermark district. This is the usual procedure, but still, Zuzana knows that her job is only half legal. When asked at the border about the purpose of her stay, they have drummed into her to answer that she is going on holiday. Being half legal also means: no registration in Austria and being neither eligible for earnings-related benefits nor for a pension in Slovakia. At least the agency has provided her with health insurance. “I feel quite safe though”, Zuzana reassures, “everybody knows what’s going on, but even officials turn a blind eye”. The Austrian government is aware of the fact that, especially in the area of long-term care for the elderly, there is a state of emergency with regards to available personnel. In Austria there is an obvious shortage of people who, like Zuzana, don’t mind readjusting their lives and giving true meaning to the ‘all time can demand’ working style.

Zuzana usually arrives in Austria on a Wednesday. Together with her “chauffeur”, a driver organised by her Slovak agency, they pass along lush meadows and cabbage fields. The road is lined by colourful wild flowers and container buildings. The driver drops her off right in front of her patient’s house, a grand bright yellow villa sitting a little away off the main road behind a few sparse trees. The flat of her patient and his wife is huge: 200 square meters with wooden floors (including the remnants of a maid’s room, now used as an extra storage room near the kitchen). The interior is made up of seventies style memorabilia. From the moment Zuzana puts down the suitcase in her room her life gets a new rhythm: the rhythm of her patient.

Zuzana’s room is accessible from the hallway as well as from the patient’s bed room, in case something happens during the night. Fortunately, that is only the exception. On a normal day her patient calls her at around 6:30. Zuzana is already up. She helps him with his morning toilet, singing “Auf der schönen blauen Donau…”, practising her German. She will stay at his side, all day long: eating lunch when he eats, watching TV when he watches, and sitting underneath the cherry tree in the spacious backyard when he meets with old friends. It’s a balancing act. On the one side she needs to be available on call, on the other she feels the need to respect her patient’s and his wife’s privacy. Zuzana barely has any herself. She is entitled to just two hours of free time a day, not necessarily to be given in one piece. Then she refreshes her make-up, which she nevertheless puts on every morning. She goes for a walk in the little town and meets one of the other four Slovak women who work there as nurses as well. Sometimes she buys herself Austrian and German Volksmusik CDs to bring home: Hansi Hinterseer, Claudia Jung, Michele. Though Zuzana loves going bargain hunting, she mostly keeps that for Slovakia.

For her two weeks of work, Zuzana earns 700 Euros. 10% of this salary goes to her agency. That leaves 630 Euros for her. This is twice the monthly salary which she received when working as a nurse in a local hospital in Slovakia where she had to look after 30 patients, 12 hours a day. Nevertheless, regular Austrian health care providers are usually paid 25 to 36 Euros per working hour. And thus, they are too expensive for many Austrian people in need of permanent care. In the meantime Austrian officials have launched image campaigns to attract more people to train in the health sector professions and organise re-training for the unemployed. However, the success of these efforts has been very limited. It is likely that it’s neither the salary nor plain ignorance which prevents the majority of addressed persons taking on the challenge. It’s this new-old concept of flexibility, such a job demands: a flexibility somewhere between a maid and an au pair.

Zuzana has made herself comfortable in the wheel chair next to her patient. Her golden ringed fingers knead her manicured hands; once in a while she reaches over, gently stroking her patient’s restless hands. When she talks to him, she looks at him from the corner of her laughing eyes which hold a mischievous caring twinkle. This time Zuzana was lucky with her placement. Before she was placed with her current patient she was working in Vienna, taking care of an old woman. They didn’t get along well and after four months of endurance, Zuzana quit. It took her half a year to decide whether she would give it another try but she eventually turned again to her agency. Zuzana can tell a lot of other similar stories: The Catholic girl, who had to stay in her room on Christmas with a Christmas dinner consisting of half a sausage and bread; the colleague’s room, in which the temperature never exceeded 11 degrees, and so on. Estimates are that about 400-2400 migrants working as home health care providers do so under precarious conditions, which are not subject to official inspections that monitor conditions. The number of cases might be a lot higher though. Nurses are paid privately by their patients or patient’s relatives, who cannot book these amounts as tax-deductible. Thus, collecting reliable data is very complicated. Even more so, as Austrian agencies do not make any indication of their nurses’ nationalities when they advertise on their web-pages.

Zuzana helps her patient’s wife in the kitchen. They are baking cheese turnovers, common in Austria as well as in Slovakia. It’s not stipulated that she has to help running the household, but Zuzana is glad to have some variety every once in a while. The smell of freshly baked dough fills the kitchen. Zuzana knows the recipe. Sometimes she takes out one of the hefty, unwieldy cookbooks still written in old German typography and copies recipes she wants to try out at home. When Zuzana is back home, for the two weeks in between her shifts, she takes over the household from her mother again. When she is abroad working, her mother takes care of Zuzana’s household, the garden and the kids. In these two weeks, Zuzana’s mother only finds time for herself half an hour after lunch, which is reserved for her favourite soap opera, and the one hour church service she attends every evening.

The first day Zuzana is back home in Slovakia, in the white painted house with a huge garden, she usually just rests, needing some time to regain strength again and getting readjusted to her new rhythm. Now she can get up late, put on her light-blue Bikini and sit down in the apple tree shade near the chicken coop, avoiding the hot summer sun. Her suitcase is already unpacked, the small Madonna statue neatly placed next to the family picture with her and the kids on the kitchen shelf. Inside though, Zuzana is already restlessly organising her time: she knows that her mother wants to go over the bills with her and needs help with picking and bottling the ripe apricots. She needs to be a mother to thirteen year old Vladko, who is always near her the minute she arrives, eager to show her how strong his muscles got from exercising. Vladko even tries to put a little effort in his school work now and he is glad in the knowledge that for two weeks he gets protected from going to church services with his grandma. Finally, Zuzana needs to take care of the renovation of her house: the new parquet has already been laid in the living room, the old dark furniture has been removed to the basement. Zuzana needs to select the new furniture and get a manual worker to put parquet in the other rooms. Then she wants to ask her mother and husband what to do with the pigsty, which has been out of use already for a long time, “Well, at least the façade can still wait a few years”, Zuzana laughs.

Her husband Vladimir takes off his shirt, gets himself a cold beer and grabs a chair to rest in front of the pigsty. He doesn’t feel like making a decision. He is tired. At school, where he works as a janitor, they need to redo the roof. It’s been hot and the only thing he wants to care about right now is the evening barbeque.

Her job in Austria has made Zuzana the main breadwinner. Though her mother is relieving her of a lot of work while she is away, Zuzana remains the household manager. When she is home in Slovakia, Zuzana feels the need to not just recover but to get actively involved in everything that is going on: looking after Vladko’s school work, preparing for the village fair on Saturday, planning the weekly grocery shopping. It seems almost difficult for her to actually enjoy her time home. Her husband has planned to go to their summer cottage for a family vacation for the next week. The wooden cottage is just 30 kilometres away. It’s where they go every summer, but Zuzana still doesn’t know whether she is joining her husband this time. Fishing and swimming – she doesn’t really care about that and there is still so much to do while she is in Slovakia. She knows, in fourteen days, the Madonna will be missing next to the family picture, already travelling to Austria.

“Sonntagsruhe” – day of rest

Sunday. Noon. 700 meters above sea level but the air is stiff and lazy. No wind, no breeze. The sun shines straight overhead, flashing its rays onto the neatly placed detached family houses. People are having a siesta in their back yards. On terraces or in the shade of trees they try to forget the second “Jahrhundertsommer”. But instead of listening to birds singing or children playing there is an unpleasant sound disturbing this peaceful Sunday’s calm. It sounds like ‘rshhh, rshhh, rshhh. Rshhh, rshhh, rshhh’ – a disturbing noise, even though it’s Sunday’s prime time; even though people here observe Sunday as a day of rest, even more so, as this is a small, Catholic-dominated Austrian town.

Sitting just across from the sound’s source, only seperated from it by thick privet shrubs, the next door neighbour feels the need to react, the need to intervene; not only today but every Sunday. He knows that his neighbour behind the bushes is the owner of a successful building contractor that employs Polish workers over the summer. Illegally of course. The workers come to Austria for a short period of time, earn as much money as possible, then they return to Poland. When they have their day off, they “do their boss a little favour”, earn a little extra money and spruce up his spacious family home, doing little repairs, maintenance works. Every Sunday. The neighbour’s carport got bigger, the roofed entrance got restored and the former garage now serves as the children’s separate apartment– the Polish workers must be really tanned by now, the next door neighbour thinks, but also feels some pity. He breathes out, lies back in his sun chair. The sound gets softer and softer and finally subsides. The air freshens slightly from the mountain-side. He shrugs, what can he do? He knows the workers will be gone in a month or two. Their Sundays are numbered; the day of rest will be his again.

Patience for crazy Ivo

Zuzana lingers near the telephone; she needs to get herself together so as not to fulfil her duty half-heartedly. Her clothes are packed, her gifts and family keepsakes stowed. The room is cleared for her successor. But her successor doesn’t come.
Today, Zuzana got up extra early. She ordered her things, left a note about changes in medical treatment, then helped her patient with his morning toilet. Zuzana smiled and laughed as usual, sang songs with Mr. P., but the wrinkles around her eyes seemed to be somewhat more visible than usual, though thoroughly covered by make-up. Zuzana is tired.
It is the first day of her two-week vacation. She keeps thinking about her return to Slovakia, the reunion with her husband, her mother and Vladko, her teenage son. She wonders how much longer she needs to wait for the driver. Hasn’t she always been suspicious about the driver, Ivo? Crazy Ivo, she calls him. Her colleague was supposed to arrive with him at nine to take over, and now it’ s already 11.
The telephone rings. It is bad news. Crazy Ivo’s car broke down, somewhere after the Slovak-Austrian border. Where exactly is unclear. Zuzana sighs. She knows the procedure: Crazy Ivo is not a member of the Austrian RAC, thus he won’t make use of the orange emergency phones next to the road. Instead, he will take out his cell-phone, call the agency in Eastern Slovakia to send another car.
Whether the brokendown car gets repaired on the spot, she cannot be sure of.
Zuzana sees her first free day in two weeks slipping away. It is hot outside, the lawn in the backyard is aching under the sun’s merciless beams and it is probably as hot in Slovakia, where her mother could badly need the extra hand in their huge garden. The apricots are ripe; they need to be picked and bottled. Instead, Zuzana is still working – unpaid.
It is 4 p.m. when the telephone rings again. Again it is her colleague: The agency’s boss brought another car, they are already in the Steiermark district; soon they will continue their trip.
Up to now, Vladko has called three times on her mobile, asking when to start with the barbecue. Zuzana is frustrated. But not only her family back home needs to be calmed down. While Mr. P. is affable and quiet as usual, watching TV in the shady living room, his wife is getting more nervous with every second, telling Zuzana but more so herself, that she is going to complain about this “absurdity” at the agency. Right the next morning.
The last phone call arrives at 6:30. Though crazy Ivo switched cars and took off, he hasn’t come far. Heavy rain and thunderstorm set in and nested between the mountains. Having trouble seeing the road markings through the thick drops crashing against the windscreen, Ivo is not crossing the 60 kph mark.
Zuzana is still waiting. She puts Mr. P. to bed, switches on her TV and thinks over her schedule for the next few days: She needs to buy herself a new dress for the fair in their village on Saturday and order the new living room furniture. Zuzana gets out her cell-phone to call home. It can’t be more than just a few hours, until crazy Ivo picks her up.