Newcomers (11 page)

At that time Vati went to look for work in the biggest town, Ljubljana, where we had first arrived … Whenever he was away, we were alone. And that wasn’t good … Uncle Karel gave mother one less tablespoon of lard. She had to ask him specially for flour and potatoes. He forbade her to sew for my cousins: none of those girls was going to wear her city rags. “Niks schneiderei! Arbeiten!”
^d
he said. She had to chop up a whole mountain of carrots and turnips. I stood at the block and used a mallet – a block on a stick – to mix, crush, and strain the feed for the young piglets. Clunk! Clunk! Aunt Mica came out. “Barrel!” she said. “Carrots!… Pigs!” Her red pustular face bunched up into cute wrinkles. Encouragingly. And if only she had been God knows how much nicer!… “You pig! Your mother pig!…” I understood. And I almost slipped, but I managed to get a grip on myself.
I just had to remember everything … recognize the words, that was the key, and pick your own fights … I opened my mouth … wide, I looked like something was about to come out … But nothing came …

W
E HARVESTED GRAIN
on Jože’s field and bound it in sheaves … Vati worked in town at a branch of the Elite company … He sewed sleeves into ready-to-wear jackets … He would leave for work in the pre-dawn darkness and come home in the late-evening gloom … In exchange for flour and lard mother sewed a nicer dress for my cousin Minka, who was supposed to have gotten a job at the post office … She was a stout woman. Her round face radiated good will. She reminded me of Claire. She walked back and forth in the kitchen in her rustling bright silken dress and tight blouse with billowy pink satin sleeves … Aunt Mica, who was mixing dough for bread, turned around from the hearth. She said something with an ominous look on her face. “Was sagt denn diese Schlitzäugige wieder?”
^*
mother asked. I looked at my aunt. Her eyes weren’t slanted, they were as bright as pebbles. “Etwas über die Messe … daß sie mit diesem Kleid nicht zur Kirche gehen kann …”
^†
I answered.

A yellow dust rose up over Jože’s field that pricked at your skin and burned your eyes … An ox tied to a stake walked in circles over the grain, so that its hooves would thresh the grain out of the husks.
A regular merry-go-round. The post he was hitched to would creak. He walked in a circle for kilometers on end. That’s how bread was made. No other way. It was obvious the ox would succumb, so they switched him out with a horse and then the horse with the ox again. On the floor of the storehouse next to the cow barn they also threshed grain … I helped. By swinging the stick that had another stick fastened to it, over my head, and striking it … I got quite good at it, although the little kids from the neighborhood would come watch me … All little clowns, each and every one wearing too short a shirt and grinning like toads … one hand with the thumb in their mouth, the other on their pee-pee … Lunch was brought out from the house and set up in the shade … A big piece of dark bread and a dish of buttermilk … I ate so greedily I almost broke the spoon … “This climate makes the boy hungry as a wolf,” mother said. Anica and I went into the little white log building that they had shown me the first time. It was the coolest place to be. There were two benches in it and a heavy whetstone … Anica looked me straight in the eyes. She pulled her skirt up to her chin and showed me her strange, smooth pee-pee with its pink little slit down the middle. My hair stood on end. She nodded her head toward my blue shorts, as though to say I should, too … I unfastened the buttons and showed her my fuse, about the size of a little finger. Now I could see her clearly and with completely different eyes. And she could see me. We weren’t the same anymore. She had brown eyes like Stanka. And if I looked closely, the same mouth and nose with wide nostrils. She just needed to get her hair combed. Have I got a wife now or something, it suddenly occurred to me. I’ll
be able to stroke her in all the most forbidden places. And she can stroke me. They called her … She ran out, but as though she were dancing. If she hadn’t run, I would have fled … As a joke I tugged at her black ponytail … Outside it was very different: the dovecote, the dung heap down the hill, the ox plodding over scattered straw in a circle … I now had a friend among them, and that was more than a good thing. Maybe I would even get to talk to her … Upstairs in the house Uncle Jožef had a hayloft. That was where Ciril, Ivan, Anica and I, and sometimes Stanka would sleep. We were all dirty and sticky, our feet completely black … Anica lay next to me under a blanket. The edge of her skirt hid one of her knees from me. I wanted to squeeze it, mightily, like a wrestler. But she was a lot stronger than I was.… We had to get up early. Anica woke me up with a shaft of straw. She said something to me slowly. She was missing two front teeth. She pronounced everything word for word, so that I would repeat it … I couldn’t stand that … It made me bristle when anyone tried to talk to me. Enough! I knew where that was leading … I showed her that I was hungry. I wanted to lift her skirt to see her strange pee-pee again. But I didn’t want to repeat everything. We ate in the kitchen, which looked out over the dung heap. Cold corn mush from the night before, with bitter hot black coffee poured over it. Then to work … The grain was waiting for us … and then the upland meadow.

Karel forbade us to draw any water out of the well for cooking, which is why I had to go down to a spring near the timber and masonry house of a woodsman. Then I had to help Karel throw all the old litter out of the barn and carry it in baskets down to the dung heap. Then
use an old bucket on a stick to scoop up the urine and pour it into an old barrel. Then carry the barrel to the back wall of the hen house, where others like it already stood in a row. Clean out the manger, then spread out new litter for the animals. Feed them … Those poor cows that Aunt Mica milked needed a lot of attention … The dappled, the gray, the white, all of them were prettier than Mica. How could they bear to have her crusty forehead pressing against their lovely bellies? And have her fingers tug at their udders? How could they obey her squeaky voice, endure her interminable giggling?… They crowded together and looked at me askance from under their heavy eyelids, their yellow eyes … When storms raged and there was lightning over the barn, when the weather overturned carts, upended baskets and carried whole bushels of meadow down to the water … it was best to stay here with them. They weren’t afraid of anything. They just rustled the hay as they chewed or rested with their eyes closed. What God was doing out there … with those clouds in the sky, the apple trees, the carts, was just business as usual for them. They weren’t available for it. They didn’t recognize it.

One afternoon when I came back from raking at Uncle Jožef’s, Karel was waiting for me on the path. Angry. “Du niks arbeiten da,”
^‡
he said. He put a hoe in my hand and pointed back where the potato field was … Was he saying I hadn’t done anything around the house?… Mother had spent all morning digging up potatoes. Due to her fat goiter and I don’t know how many varicose veins she couldn’t do
any more … So she had left her sickle and muddy shoes outside the house and staggered off to lie down. Even Gisela had helped aunt in the morning to pick through the beans in the kitchen, even though mother didn’t like to see them together … I struck once, twice at a furrow. But the sun was too strong and my bones hurt so much from bending over in the high meadow … Let him think whatever he wants! No, I’m not going to dig anymore!… Angrily I flung the hoe back toward the train tracks and headed for the house … Karel, who had just been unhitching Liska from a pear tree, shouted, “Zurieck!”
^§
and bounded after me. I took off at a sprint and he started running and because he happened to have the chain in his hand, he hurled it at me from a distance so that it wrapped around my back and chest … I thought I was going to puke my lungs and heart out … I fell down flat on the cement by the well … Suddenly mother was outside, yelling “Mörder!” She literally carried me several yards past Mica, who had come out to look, and into the house … In our room she got me out of my trousers. Across my chest there were stinging red marks that were visibly swelling from the chain links, as though they had bitten me. The worst thing was that my back hurt and I had to lie on my stomach. I couldn’t get any air … I hadn’t done any less work than Ciril or Ivan … I just didn’t know how to work with as much ease, momentum and skill as they did, that was true. I really admired them … Especially when we raked hay first into a stack, then onto a cart, and at last into the barn. They could stab a whole houseful of hay onto their pitchforks and hoist it from the ground onto a haycart or
from a cart into the loft – while standing on a ladder!… Such a big bale that I couldn’t wrap my arms around it. And if I hugged it too tight, I’d start to feel its thorns … I heard talking outside, Vati’s weak voice … Was it already so late? Had I slept?… Mother had covered me in damp rags, causing me to shiver even more from the stinging cold … Uncle Karel came into the room. He was wearing his hat and his jacket was unbuttoned. He was entirely white in the face. This was the first time I’d seen him like this … expressionless … He was carrying a plate with a sausage, a big pear, and a thick slice of bread on it. He had come to pay me a visit. Like in the hospital. “Here,” he said, setting the plate down on a bench. He patted me on the shoulder and kept patting until I smiled at him and he smiled, too. With his whole mouth this time, causing the tips of his mustache to quiver. He stood next to the bed for a while. We looked at each other … His eyes dried up and there was less and less of a smile in them … Oh, I knew we would never be friends!… Then Vati came and sat beside me. “Du mußt jetzt arbeiten, weil es die Zeit der Ernte ist,” he said. “Ein halber Tag bei Stritz Josef, die andere Hälfte beim Karl. Dann, wo du bald in die Schule gehst, wirst du nur dem Karl helfen.”
^‖
 … Something shifted in the small of my back. An indentation on one side and a protrusion on the other … “Schau nur, was deine Grobiane von Brüdern mit dem Kind angestellt haben,” mother shrieked like a siren. “Wir müssen ins Krankenhaus.”
^a
She hugged me with her arms, her breasts, her belly. “Beruhige dich, Lisbeth. Es heilt sich von selbst, so hat es der Doktor gesagt,”
^b
Vati said to her … So had some doctor been here during this time? While I’d been sleeping?… Mother refused to calm down … She stood in the middle of the room. She was trying to illuminate the whole room like an arrow, a storm with her anger, her voice and her gestures … “Laß das, Mama, die Leute lachen uns aus,”
^c
I said angrily.

After that Karel took me along to a livestock auction. To assuage a bad conscience, out of remorse? Unfortunately he planned to sell Liska there … She swatted her tail back and forth behind us on the path over the train tracks as we led her uphill and alongside a road. First him, then me, by turns. With her in the middle and one of us on each side, not together … At the market, in simple pens there were hundreds and hundreds of cows. Some horses, mostly dray horses. Pigs. Goats. A lot of fowl, too. Noise, dust … plenty of good manure went to waste under hoof and underfoot at the market that day. I studied the peasants, the laborers, the shepherds big and small. I stood next to Liska … actually, I sat on a box of feed belonging to the next peasant over … Liska was not in a good mood. She wanted to lie down and have a good nap … Uncle Karel came back with some company. He brought me a bottle of
šabesa
. This was a sweet drink with lilac and lemon that instead of a cork had two little balls in the neck of the bottle … Everyone was covered in sweat, as though they were dying. I saw some big
money … oh, let me tell you about all the banknotes, enough to paper whole walls … going from hand to hand … Overall, though, the peasants were low-key. Karel didn’t sell anything … Though he tried … He called on God as his witness … I saw him as if on a stage: his earnest face … his cheerful face … his clever face … We went home. We tied Liska up to a tree outside the railway station and went into a restaurant where insects were flying around the rotten potatoes and it smelled of hard liquor … He ordered two servings of goulash … and rolls, a whole mountain of rolls … The goulash was too spicy for me, even though it was delicious … But the rolls! This was the first time I’d tasted white bread in three months!… The taste of their soft centers reached my nose, my eyes, almost my brain. Karel started to drink with a group that had gathered. I went out to join Liska … ripped up some grass for her … and came back. My uncle was drinking with his buddies at a round table. He introduced me, and the bowlegged peasants took as much interest in me as I did in them … He forced me to drink a little glassful no bigger than a thimble … with a swallow of brandy at the bottom. I didn’t like it. He laughed, but again his eyes were not laughing. Oh God, was I scared. This was really a bad sign …

Then I was outside during a storm for the first time. We were pulling up turnips in the rain in Karel’s field on the far side of the tracks, not far from the shack of the crazy woman down from the bright house that stood up there as if it was on stilts. We threw a whole expanse of their tousled leaves, their long mottled feathers up onto a cart … a first one, a second, a third … It was pleasant, I was wearing my shorts, and the rain and dirt had done a thorough job of soaking and spattering
me … Everyone was grinning … we had a common enemy, the downpour … “Bubi, quick … what fun!” they shouted. My happiness was showing through all the layers of mud … but I also took care not to say anything … That’s just what they’re waiting for!… The sky was literally bearing down on the black woods like an enormous log of coal … then some terrible flash … white! blinding! – as though God wanted to show us an X-ray of some enormous lungs full of black clouds, or the fury in his eyes through lightning … Click! Click! Click!… Ka-BOOM!… as if some huge porcelain marble had just shattered to pieces. And the rain … whole rivers of rain. We were all soaked to the skin, it poured onto us as though off an eave. Stanka was wearing some sort of light gown … with all of her contours showing through, her breasts, her hips, her rear end – so the beauty had a body, after all!… The rain was as hard as a body … it stuck to everything, and we almost couldn’t work our way through the furrows back to the cart … But the most important thing was the thunder, the downpour, the lightning, and that no one was afraid, nobody hid, we were all just grinning like fools … I hopped around in a puddle on one leg, I didn’t care … I opened my mouth wide and guzzled the water that came streaming down off a broken branch … Others came and joined me, I wasn’t alone. That’s what was important!…