Newcomers (15 page)

After two weeks Clairi came back from Ljubljana … She had lost the job she’d been given as an assistant seamstress. Now all four of us slept in the same bed – Gisela and me at one end, mother and Clairi at the other. At least that way we kept warm, even if there were too many legs under the blanket. The down comforter loomed up over us like a white mountain … light and warm. It reminded me of all
my Basel haunts … the park, the streets, the drumming school, the Rhine … our places on rue Helder and rue de Bourg, next to the movie theater before the St. Elisabeth Church. The comforter was so out of place that I really ought to have hidden it. It refused to blend in with Karel’s house. It covered our narrow bed like a cloud, but this cloud had been plucked from some other climate, over some other town … I began to dream about a witch who lived near my friend Friederle. She would wait in front of our building for me to come out. She would attack me … and chase me until up on the square I found a balloon I could escape in.

V
ATI SENT US A POSTCARD
from the hospital, where he had been admitted for his lungs. The message was nearly indecipherable, written with a ballpoint pen running out of ink … The cold, his unheated room, bad food, all this had taken its toll on him. Now he was laid up in a ward with twenty tubercular men and young boys … Mother was beside herself again. “So ist es, wenn man dumm ist … Und jetzt wieder diese leeren Magen!”
^*
Where were we going to get anything to put in our mouths? There was nothing left to cook. Vati’s steel strongbox in the corner of the room, which we had begun using to store foodstuffs in, was empty. I had succeeded in removing a loaf of bread from Mica’s cabinet in the entryway … Bread! We wrapped it up in
some laundry and hid it, so that Karel or our aunt wouldn’t discover it during one of the searches of our room that they periodically conducted when we were out of the house … One Sunday Clairi and I went to see the priest in Prečna, where Vati’s bell hung in the church belltower. We wanted to ask him to lend us some money. If we didn’t get that, then we were going to ask for some groceries. The wooden steps to the rectory door creaked as if in a barn. The priest sat wearing glasses in his wretched office like a peasant in his attic smokehouse. This was the first time I’d seen a priest in civilian dress. He looked like Jožef and his desk was only slightly bigger than a feed bin. From his pantry he gave us a paper bag of beans and a big chunk of homemade bread. But Clairi insisted on money. She was so brave in her persistence that I had to admire her … At first he didn’t want to give us a cent. Then he relented and took ten coins out of his desk drawer. That was enough for us to buy two pounds of lard and bread to last us another ten days … We were even able to send Vati two dinars in a letter envelope … Oh, if money grew in fields, we could have dug it up like we did potatoes. But two weeks later we were beggars again … This time we went to visit Uncle Jožef. I didn’t feel like going in with her to plead. I also didn’t feel like listening to any arguing, even the nice words that Clairi would exchange with our uncle. I couldn’t stand noise anymore. While I waited for Clairi in that hidden nook off the trail where Vati once sat to pluck all the raisins out of the priest’s potica, I went through the possibilities: Had she said it by now or not? Had they given her something, or not?… Minka, the nicest of them all, came out the door nearest the barns and Uncle Jožef went to the
granary … Then Clairi started calling me … she had potatoes in a borrowed basket, a whole pot of lard, flour, two bunches of carrots, milk, half a dozen eggs and a big cut of dried meat … This was luxury, provisions that would last us nearly a month, and I skipped the whole way home …

Shortly before Christmas mother and Clairi got sick. They had come down with angina and a high fever, just as they had every year before that. They constantly spat their mucus out onto dry leaves that I set beside their beds and changed several times a day … I had to use the last of our money to buy aspirin at the pharmacy in town. When they had angina in Basel, they would both spend a whole week in bed … The doctor, old Dr. Fritz Goldschmidt, would come to examine them. Gisela and I made our bed on two benches alongside the window … I gathered some twigs and branches … and made quite a comfy nest for us. It reached from under the window practically up to the ceiling. All nicely snapped and bundled. But Vati’s strongbox was empty again, with not the tiniest bean left in it. This was going to be our first Christmas without a tree. The kind sisters from the house down by the water brought us four pieces of cake and a bowl of mush, plus spoons to eat it with. I boiled up some tea in a saucepan. They had lost all their strength and couldn’t eat hard food. They wanted me to fix them a thin flour soup with a beaten egg mixed in. I thought I was going to burst from worrying about them. I wasn’t inclined to ask Jožef for help, much less Karel. Anyway, nobody in the house showed any concern for us anymore. Early, before anyone in the house got up, I crept out to the henhouse built out of an old wardrobe. I climbed
up its doors and felt through the straw. There was nothing. Then I went down under the threshing floor. On an anvil, hidden beneath a bundle of straw, there were three newly laid eggs. That was a surprise! I was just on the verge of picking up two of them … when behind me, snap!… there was Karel with his whip … I burst out crying, and not from the pain … As distinctly as I could I said that my mother and sister were seriously ill and that I had to fix them some burnt flour soup with egg to help them get their strength up. “Zurick!
^†
Put the eggs back! Damn thief!” Karel shouted. I set them back down. “March!” I ran. “Thieves! Damn thieves!” Karel kept shouting. “They’ll steal everything they can get their hands on.” Both of my sisters stepped out of the house and the young hairdresser looked out her window. The whole world was being informed about my shame. “Zurick in die Schweiz! Zurick in die Schweiz!”
^‡
Mother and Clairi were shaking and colorless, having propped themselves up on their elbows in bed. “Was ist denn? Was hast du wieder angestellt?”
^§
“Eier geholt.”
^‖
“Warum bittest du nicht die Schwester da unten oder den Joseph?”
^a
I bit my lip. I wasn’t about to try to explain anymore if the women didn’t get it … What if I asked Ciril and Ivan, instead of uncle? We weren’t such good friends anymore … we didn’t even talk to each other at school during breaks … There wasn’t a
scrap of food left in the house … There were two locks on the entryway cupboard with flour and lard, one in front and one on the side. I couldn’t go to the old sisters … They had already given us too much on their own … The forester’s children looked at me from their terrace when I came to get water. Probably the whole village had already been informed in detail about my perfidious deed … That afternoon Poldka handed me a small basket of potatoes and carrots through her window. It was enough for a soup. Mica was baking bread when I got back … “Shoo! Get away from here!” she chased me away with big oven tongs, afraid I was going to swipe one of her just-baked loaves of bread, firm and grainy, cooling under a sheet on the table. Saliva practically flooded my mouth … That’s when I decided to do something that might have cost me my life if I’d been caught. I was going to steal some meat from the attic! While Karel and Mica were out tending the pigs, I climbed up in my stockings … one, two, each step separately. I pushed the hatch open and entered a world of hanging hams and sausages … I pulled off a long, moldy salami and even a ham with the hook still embedded in it. And if I ran into Karel?… I’d kill him! Flat out, like an ant underfoot. Plant my foot on his chest so that he’d – wham! – go flying back down the stairs!… I had such wide eyes that I had to wonder where this place was … This was the life I experienced … its raw, exposed nerve … There was no one in sight …

After that smoke suddenly began coming out of the stove … Every day. The smoke would billow into our room … it stung and we coughed and choked. We opened the window … but the icy wet cold
of the snow and the Krka surged in from outside. “Der Karel hat etwas in den Ofen gesteckt.”
^b
We went to have a look at the smokehouse that the vestibule had become, but we couldn’t discover anything. Gray smoke enveloped the room and crept over its ceiling like steam over a forest … “Das ist eine Verschwörung,”
^c
mother said … One day she came to pick me up at school because my fights at the quarry with the Gypsies showed no sign of abating, and as we reached the train crossing heading out of town, one of Ciril and Ivan’s friends began pelting us with stones and shouting, “Hitler! Hitler!” Mother ran on ahead, but I didn’t want to leave this debt unpaid … I picked up some of the granite ballast from the track bed and began throwing it at him. I wouldn’t relent. They said that Hitler wanted to take over the world. The
Patriot
, a newspaper that Karel got every Sunday, had pictures. One of them showed a soldier in a resplendent uniform … in his helmet, boots and ribbons, with a pair of binoculars, standing in front of a crossing barrier, on top of which stood another soldier not at all like the first, in a leather helmet with a metal spike on the top and an old-fashioned rifle. “That’s how it started with Austria,” was the caption under the picture. They said that Germany was going to march into Poland or Czechoslovakia … A lot of people went to the forester’s house to listen to his son’s radio. Bit by bit people began to avoid us. “Warum,” I asked mother, “hat niemand auf der Welt die Deutschen gern?”
^d
“Weil sie hochnasig sind und immer Krieg
wollen,”
^e
she answered … Barely would we try to light the stove again than that suffocating wool would permeate the room. That was our punishment from Karel for the ham. I had hid it behind some masonry stones out in the barn wall. I would go there to slice some off, and throw the pieces into a pot with barley and beans. The mixture produced a really hearty soup … “Wo hast du das Fleisch her?”
^f
mother asked. Some I got some from Ciril, some from Jožef, and some from the two sisters, I tried to extricate myself. Oh, if she had known that I’d snatched it from Karel, she would have taken me by the ear straight to him … One evening, when he and Mica weren’t home, I took some ladders from the shed to the back of the house … I set them up by the steps that were overgrown with nettles and climbed up … The rotten wood of the gutter had burst. The black straw roof was covered in ice crystals like the fur of some dog. I grabbed onto the ends of black straw and yanked out a big handful the size of a roofing tile and then on my knees, elbows, and belly somehow made my way up to the chimney. I reached inside … it was cold, but also warm, sticky, dry, hot … I couldn’t see or feel anything … So where was the stuff that had been causing our stove to smoke so unbearably?… Mother got up out of bed and, still dizzy, walked through the vestibule into Karel’s part of the house to talk with him. It was warm and airy there … For a few days there was no smoke, then all of a sudden – whoosh, whoosh! –
back it came through the stove door, the seams and three other places in the stovepipe …

A
T LAST
on some Saturday when he was released from hospital Vati appeared … Pale and haggard in his thick winter jacket, his eyes watery and his hair grayer and thinner. He was barely able to walk the whole way home from our train stop … especially not with that ridiculous skipping walk of his. Once in our room, he had to lie down immediately and then again every so often, or at the very least sit down … He had brought along a paper bag of bread rolls, already half stale, that he’d saved up during his last days in the hospital. They dissolved in coffee, and if you put them in water and mixed in some groats, it made a particular kind of food that did a wonderful job of filling our stomachs … Mother immediately told him everything about the stove and the smoke … Vati got up and went over to visit his brother in his place … In his and mother’s presence, Karel pulled a round piece of painted metal out of the stovepipe. This open admission of his perfidy was an unusually brave act on his part … The stove stopped smoking … but it can’t go on like this, mother told Vati. We can’t take it here any longer. It’s not working. We have to go to Ljubljana. And once we live together, our living expenses are bound to be less, too … Vati had arranged with the train engineer to take him to Ljubljana and back in the luggage compartment for very little money. That was an adventure I envied him for … riding in with the packages, letters and bundles. On Sunday evening he had to go back to Ljubljana so he could be at
Elite first thing Monday morning. A railway man helped him up into the green mail car and then slid the door shut … He was going to sell some of the furs from his wicker chest at a loss, he promised before he left, and send us the money for train tickets …

My first semester grades were excellent. How they got that way was a mystery to me. My Slovene was full of mistakes, my notebooks a mess of ink, partly because I wrote my assignments in my bench, sitting on the floor. I was fine at arithmetic because it was simple. Drawing and gymnastics, too. History was all incredible fairy tales … Only the big wall map made me afraid … so many different kinds of details, lines, spots, dots, and stripes for such a little country, as though it were the entire globe. Was anybody still allowed to walk on the earth without having all these maps, rivers, mountains, and parallels in his head?… After school I would go with Clairi and Gisela out to the woods to gather kindling. But also to avoid running into Karel. Still, we stayed close enough to have the yellow house in the meadow with its black-traced windows constantly in view, especially when we left mother home alone … In winter the pine forest wasn’t as dry as a deciduous forest, which turned into a big skeleton on its snowy blanket … One afternoon Clairi was out in the woods with Gisela when I got home from school. I ran into them out in the biggest clearing, where the tracks started to turn. They were talking with the forester, who stood in front of her in his fur hat … All the color had drained from Clairi’s face. “Was mir der Herr Lokar gerade erzählt, ist unglaublich …”
^*
“Ist Wahrheit … Vater von Vater, prapraded, Urgroßvater von Herr Alojz und Karl war Zigeuner …”
^†
“Hörst du das, Bubi?”
^‡
Clairi asked, looking faint … I looked at him as though he weren’t in his right mind. “So ein Zigeuner, wie die da … die im Steinbruch leben mit Zelten und Pferden?”
^§
Clairi asked, her lips trembling. “Ja, ja,” the earnest forester laughed. “So ist’s. Aber schon lange Zeit her … ein Jahrhundert!”
^‖
 … I looked out at the road in confusion … The Gypsies I fought with every day … that ate horses, lounging around with their wagons and their women, whose bare nipples showed through their colorful rags … those were supposed to be our ancestors and relatives?!… Clairi left the forest looking like she’d been felled … “Bubi, das darfst du auf keinen Fall der Mama erzählen. Höchstes Geheimnis!”
^a
she said severely. Then she laughed, “Und doch … bin ich ein wenig stolz darauf … Veilleicht, weil ich so ängstig bin …”
^b
She brandished her bundle of branches around her. “Auf wilden Pferden reiten … immer in anderen Orten … wandern … Feuer machen. Uh!”
^c
She started to dance a little … excited and enraptured … This thing about the Gypsies was news to me … 
But I still kept fighting with them … Full force, so that we toppled over like bowling pins … They’d swing at my eyes, I’d swing back at them, they’d leg wrestle me, I’d kick them back … they’d grab my thumb in their teeth, I’d rip a whole hank of lice-ridden hair from their scalps. Nobody could have pulled us apart …