Newcomers (19 page)

Much later, several weeks after our arrival, he and I set out for an air show at the airport … Old Baloh, Štef and Marija also went with us … We took side paths and shortcuts and snuck through a beech grove so we wouldn’t have to pay admission at the airport … The meadow was full of banners and people. The planes did all kinds of acrobatics and flew flags on their tails … sky-divers jumped out of them … and gliders released pigeons from cages … Vati discovered that the handiest thing to do was to lie down in the grass and look up at everything flying and doing loops, at the cupolas of chutes opening up in the air. That’s when I got in the practice of lying down to look at the sky, at stars and clouds …

Back at home everything was out of joint again. Bang! Vati sat down at the table with his back turned to mother and began sewing a fur with a thread three feet long … jerking his arm way up over his head. Whirrrr! mother started nervously working the pedals of her sewing machine … That the two of them had ever hugged? Impossible … Vati kept carping the whole time at Clairi about Gisela. But she wasn’t afraid of him. She would walk right past his chair to mother or me, as though Vati wasn’t even there … Clairi would come home from Elite completely worn out … on foot, more than an hour’s walk, in order to save the money she would otherwise have spent for a streetcar ticket. Her heart was acting up. It was throbbing all the way up near the armpit. She had to lie down … She always held her hands turned forward when she walked, or turned up when she was lying down.
While she was resting, I was tempted to turn them over at the wrist, to correct her posture … but I left her alone, because she would have hit me if I did … She had a tremendous desire to eat her fill of a variety of fine dishes, especially cakes. For lunch she and Vati would always sit in the park and have some slices of bread and a bit of salami, and now and then they would treat themselves to an apple … “Heute,” she told me when we were alone, “bin ich einem älteren Herrn so sehr aufgefallen, daß er mich eine Stunde angestarrt hat … aber Vati saß leider die ganze Zeit bei mir. Vielleicht, Bubi, werde ich einmal einen feinen älteren Mann treffen, der mich trotz Gisela heiraten wird. Dann wirst du etwas zu staunen bekommen: uns allen wird es wie durch einen Zauber gehen …”
ⁱ
She believed that eventually somewhere in the world she was going to meet an understanding man who was smart and not too old, who would give her everything … clothes, a decent house, travel, perfumes … and with whom she would have a nice life, not like mother and Vati’s … “Nur warum wurden wir auf die Welt gestellt von diesen zwei, die sich nie verstanden haben?”
^j
That was too complicated. That part I didn’t understand. Welt, monde, svet! That part was nice! A garden with shiny globes, paths, flowers, roses, gazebos, striped lounge chairs, swimming pool … a forest, fields,
and the Sava flowing through white gravel … The world was magnificent! It looked boldly up at the sky like a baby … Clairi pressed me to herself, as though I were her husband, and rubbed her cheek against my shoulder … Was I supposed to believe that she was just my sister, a child of Vati and mother like myself?… I couldn’t … She belonged more to people who were constantly arguing … that jungle where eyes got lost even close up … where chaos came to life in the most colorful way, and which excluded any sense of rules or regular patterns of repetition … I fled to join the boys and girls from Jarše in the woods, where at least something was happening.

O
N THE FAR SIDE
of our landlord’s back hedge there was a one-story house of unplastered brick. So carelessly thrown together, with the bricks jutting out of the walls, that I could have built it better … One afternoon, several days after we arrived, I noticed an unkempt dark-haired girl in a red dress who looked exactly like Anica. She was standing on the other side of the gap in the hedge, looking at me. I pointed my hand toward the area between her legs and dropped my shorts. She lifted her skirt up and pulled down her panties. Due to the leaves I couldn’t quite make out her bun or she my pee-pee … She waved for me to come around the hedge and join her … Her mother, I’d heard, had once been a cook at the royal court. But which one? The court of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef or the castle of the young King Peter, who parted his hair on the side like Hitler?… Next to the road before her house there was a brown wooden shack
with curtained windows and a sign that said
POP – ŠABESA
. A young woman lived in this wooden structure who wore a wide, flouncy, rustling skirt of coarse silk. They called her the “basket” and said that every night a different man stayed over in her shack, which had once been a sweet shop … In front of the cook’s house there was a field with kale and beans. The girl resembling Anka, Adrijana, was already waiting for me there … The house was as sooty and scabby as a barn … the dirt floor littered with cinders … Straps and hoes hung from the unfinished walls in the vestibule. Adrijana had a little and a big brother, who was a baker and had a new racing bicycle … She wiggled her blackened fingers at me to come in … In the middle of a big room with brick walls whose floor was also scattered with cinders, there was a big stove made of stone, resembling a well, with its stovepipe leading up through a hole in the roof. With little scoops, rakes, rusty shovels, chisels and black pots hanging everywhere … In a corner beneath the paneless window there was a bunk under a big heap of rags … I stopped and had a good look around. That’s what I always did to get used to a new place. It wasn’t the poverty that frightened me, but how hollow the house was. So this was the home of a woman who had once worked at the royal court, where everything gleamed golden and alabaster. I wasn’t surprised, because as early as Steinenvorstadt I had seen lots of people – rich merchants, including Vati – who lost everything overnight and then lived like beggars in some miserable room … Adrijana took me by the hand and led me over to the stove … It contained a whole wheelbarrow full of fatty soot and ashes heaped up to the edge … When I leaned over to look in,
Adrijana squeezed my balls in her hand, causing my pee-pee to hurt, and I squeezed her bulge through her skirt. I was looking around to find some corner of the room we could go to hug, when Adrijana led me to the bunk … Then something stirred and rose up … and the face of the dwarfish cook looked out of the rags … broad, flat, tiny and so covered with spots that it resembled a pan full of dried cracklings … I said
Koot tay
and ran out of there as fast as I could.

No, I had imagined girls differently. Clean … wearing cute dresses and colorful knee socks. And button-up shoes. Light blue cardigan sweaters. A chain necklace and light down in the hollow at the back of her neck. Glossy, brushed hair without any ribbons or braids … In plaid skirts in winter and a little coat with a fur collar, boots, and earrings under a woolen cap … If I ran into a girl who was wearing at least one of the items on my list, I turned to wood, as though bewitched … Štef’s sister Marija had a gray face, slate-like eyes, scraggly braids, hair so thin you could see through to her scalp, and a smock made out of the material used for umbrellas … When her kitty died and we buried it in a shoebox in the meadow next to the gravel pit, she was so sad as she made up its bier of daisies and cherry pits and she cried so unstoppably that she became cute and lovable … The blacksmith’s daughter was also pretty, reminsicent of the postman’s daughter in Lower Carniola, who was already sixteen. She had a lot of blond hair and a round face with apricot skin and a nose like a baby’s. She was prettiest of all riding her new bicycle … when she came racing by, sitting upright, her front wheel in the air and the rear wheel on the road, her arms crossed, not touching the handlebars … When she got pregnant by some boy,
her father punished her. He waited for her at the crossroads near the street lamp on the telegraph pole. Belt strap in hand, he forced her to get off the bike, kneel on the ground and crawl on her hands and knees from the pole around both roads to the smithy courtyard … her face smudged and her dress filthy with dust. Once they finally reached the courtyard, he began to lay into her with the belt … People came out of the neighboring houses to watch and nobody said a word. That was the father’s right, they said, a daughter who’s brought shame to her family has to crawl home on her knees … Those were the young ones. But the other, older women in the neighborhood!… Mirko’s mother, for instance, from the wagon in the gravel pit … She would sit Turkish style in the grass, cleaning lettuce, and because she wore a short skirt and her stockings were fastened below the knee, I could see her full, white legs … almost up to the point where that unusual black bridge between the hips began, and I gasped like a bellows … I just took care not to look her straight in her gray face … and to avert my eyes from her crotch, but my head kept turning back there all on its own … Those were women who were suitable for bed or the outhouse … I felt like pulling her skirt up over her head … becoming coarse, grabbing her hair and shaking her like a pear tree … sniffing all her various smells, baring her big, supple butt that moved closer and closer to the ground … As I had that old hag when I was stealing potatoes from a field near the airport … We thought those potatoes were for the taking, when suddenly a peasant appeared out of the forest, and on horseback, at that … Everybody was out of there like a streak … I lagged behind, I stayed, I only had about five potatoes in my sack … 
and I ran around blindly on those side paths near the airport and got lost … Finally I reached some rough-hewn shack standing off by itself in the brush … and noticed a fat woman in just a slip on the far side of its hedge. She was sitting amid trash and worm-eaten peas, trying to thread a needle. She had a face like an udder, eyeless, noseless, mouthless, even hairless … She couldn’t get the thread to go into her sewing implement. She scratched her thighs, under her belly where the furry depression showed black, and her nipples, which stretched taut as planets … She resembled the miller’s wife from the fairy tale, Lucifer’s mother, whom the hungry young man went to visit … To get him to stay with her and love her forever, she conjured up a richly laden table for him every day with all kinds of exquisite dishes and drinks … I was immediately ready to live with this hag, the way you live at night in your dreams … I would caress her and love her, night and day I would lie next to her fat body in bed … And I would eat, eat, and eat!… Sweet twitches passed through my little pole … and I imagined shoving it into the gray forest, that strange mouth under the belly, as if into dough … I couldn’t tear myself away from the hedge, I shoved in and out, as if I were with her under a comforter, until I finally felt some end and it all passed.

I could imagine all women like this, except for Enrico’s mother. She was too pure, beautiful and bright for me to imagine without her clothes on … With naked breasts, bottom, and belly … The skin of her face was so white. And her hair, with waves on both sides that seemed like a single curl, a big treble cleff. The ring in her ear cast a violet reflection on her cheek and neck … I couldn’t imagine her
long, pretty arms in anything but motherly caresses … nor her pale lips, which weren’t painted into a rectangle, like they were on other women … she didn’t use makeup at all … kissing anything but a cheek or a forehead … nor did the big, almost lonely brown eyes of her long face ever become harsh, cold or hateful … You never heard the sound of squeaking bedsprings coming from her room, like you did from the Permes’ upstairs or the shack selling pop … When she wore her low-cut blouse, it would never have occurred to me to pull the front down to see more, and when she sat, I never once glanced at her knees … With her, everyplace else was as pure as her face and her hands. She was almost an angel, perhaps even a nun at one time, ready for nothing more than friendly squeezes, pleasant smiles and heartfelt talks … The bricklayer could be happy to have a wife who was such an aristocrat …

M
AY CAME
 … I was on my way with the Balohs and others to the new church in Moste for devotions to Mary … At a crossroads before we reached St. Martin’s Road we suddenly ran into the Pestotniks and other Falcons and girls … They were on their way back from exercising at the National Home … We spotted each other from a distance and as we drew close, both sides got ready … It started with taunts: “Hey, owls!…” “Falcons!…” “Clerical curs!…” “Red rubbish!” Shouts, arguments, then blows … The path was narrow. We went first then they had at us. We shoved each other into the grass, the clover, the wheat … The girls started squealing like cats. And went running to the houses with pianos for help from adults … We pushed toward the property
markers and the telegraph poles. Once you get slugged in the face, the hatred comes from somewhere deep down. And it floods everything. And it’s so deep that a bit of it stays in you … They threw themselves on each other … twisting, rolling ahead, rolling back … Two girls grabbed at each other’s hair, too, by the ribbons … The Falcons knew some good punches and in their gym clothes they were lighter, too. Our guys shouted too much, and Štef wasn’t there … I didn’t feel like getting involved … I’d gone with the Pestotniks to the Falcons’ exercise grounds in Moste a few days before … I’d seen the brothers and sisters dressed in red and white carrying a big flag like a carpet between them, and the decorated portrait of King Petar. A brass band played the anthem. They shouted “Hail! Hail!” and sang … I didn’t like it … all that defiance and rigidity came out of nowhere … perhaps from the high schools … Some tall, skinny guy from a small house by the road was approaching … I acted as though I didn’t see him and let him get close. When he leapt at me with his arms stretched out and his right leg extended … I didn’t wait anymore … and I slugged him in the chest for all I was worth and kicked him in the shins, so that he howled and began hopping around like a frog … He was out!… Then one of his girls came running up and started whining and sniffing around me … I stretched out an arm … Brats are the same everywhere in the world … if you don’t strike immediately, nothing works later … Spoiled mamas’ boys and cosseted baby girls … We wiped off our faces, slapped the dust off our shirts and picked the straw out of each other’s hair … The church in Moste was full and we had to stand on steps along the side wall. The church was new and very white … only a few statues
and paintings, all very bright, stood here and there in niches or hung on the walls. It wasn’t like a church at all, more like a whitewashed hangar, or synagogues in Africa that were white so the black people could see each other more easily. Somehow God couldn’t be here. He had to be in dark churches, so dark that there had to be lamps or at least candles burning in order for you to look around. So that darkness descended on you when you entered and you couldn’t see a single person in the pews … So you could pray or think as you saw fit … Here that wasn’t possible … You saw all the people, and in the light of day as it fell through the clear windows all the faces were as alike as under the open sky … I didn’t care to go back there for services …