Newcomers (25 page)

Z
DRAVKO ALL BUT DISAPPEARED
for a time and sickly Robert was always out on errands with his mother. He needed a lot of air … I was left with Gisela, the twins, or the old monkeys over behind the hospice’s fence. I couldn’t understand how a person could become so old and decrepit and still feel like living. Particularly in as messy a yard as that. If only the old folks were at least a little bit nice. But sometimes their eyes would start glinting as though a whole madhouse had just opened up in their heads. They also sang now and then, sometimes in the middle of the night, like monks … I could hear them through the wall. They didn’t have bad voices.

Finally I gave myself a kick and headed over to the barracks. I climbed up the fence and looked in. What utter poverty! The wooden shacks were as shabby as those plague-eaten horses in the pictures of my illustrations … Heaps of rusted metal, pipes, strips, and sheets … And what wasn’t strewn around the gate … motorcycle tires, holy icons, horse collar padding … But they had piglets in pens, with chickens pecking around, and rabbits in warrens … There was a brilliant sign on the fence: “Cunt and prick make little Dick,” next to which there
was a picture of something like poop dropping into a potty … A few boys with bowl haircuts came out accompanied by girls. I wasn’t afraid of them … they seemed to be shyer than I was. I particularly liked one of the girls. She was wearing a skirt that probably belonged to her mother, because it reached to the ground. Her ass almost bounced like a ball. Dark hair. With a little ring on her tanned hand … They invited me to come on over the wall … Lots of interesting wrenches lying around heaps of old metal, some of which would have made fine brass knuckles. And cleaning rods like arrows. Unusual package-like parts of machines. And fat rubber bands for slingshots and tanks that you could make out of spindles. Sheets of aluminum. Glass liquor bottles … I kept close to my Gypsy girl. She let me know that she liked me. She was like Adrijana and Anka rolled into one … We scaled a few little fences and in an empty, abandoned pigpen with high walls we kissed each other on the dry cinders; she put her tongue in my mouth … she stroked my balls so hard, with both hands, the way the little Gypsy girls in Cegelnica begged for a dinar, and I stroked her cherry with its little groove. Her little sisters and brothers exploded with laughter. They made fun of our caresses by rubbing themselves between the legs and kissing the air with big, puffed-up cheeks, as if in some big movie … When I came back the next day, firmly resolved to see our nastiness to its end, my girlfriend was gone … she had moved … It was always like that: either I moved or others did.

At the end of Bohorič Street on the other side of the railroad crossing was the Salesian Home, which housed the Kodeljevo movie theater. This building and the playgrounds below it is where you would see
some strange boys, all of them religious and a little crippled. They would kick the ball in a restrained, oddly tame sort of way under the watchful eye of their trainer and referee, a young priest in a cassock, with a whistle clenched in his mouth, who kept jumping around among the spectators … Their founder was the blessed don Bosco, the educator priest whose life I was familiar with … The players ran around their shallow clay-covered depression in pathetically baggy uniforms like harlequins … The goalie was leaning up against the goal, probably because his position gave him some peace and quiet that he could use to think about things. He didn’t like it when they disturbed him and he always let the ball go by … Toward the end of the game they looked like staggering statues of clay … The reason for the bad match was probably that they didn’t have any real opponent. They were playing against themselves. They were so light and thin, just skin and bones like me. They almost didn’t weigh anything … when they attacked, if the wind picked up speed, they would go flying over the edge of the field with the ball … If I compared them to the Falcons’ team across the train tracks in Moste! The way those guys marched up the embankment, well-fed, each of them carrying a soccer ball under his arm, with their captain out in front, the whole team in their pale pink uniforms contrasting vividly against the blue sky … The Salesian Home was as much home to gawky boys and girls as the new church next-door and the movie theater it contained. They always showed movies from all different times there … black and white ones, old-fashioned sepia ones, modern ones in color. And always two at a time: an adventure movie and a comedy, a detective
story and a tragedy, an operetta and a serious drama … If I had a spare dinar, I would go sit in their big, red auditorium … The Salesian boys and girls acted like they owned the whole building. They ran around the place with bunches of keys to various main doors and side doors, to cabinets and closets, entrances and exits and various stairways … They didn’t behave like some closed little society that doesn’t let in any outsiders, but they did act as though they were themselves a bunch of Errol Flynns, Mickey Rooneys and Shirley Temples, day after day entertaining the public from the screen in the big auditorium … They had their own little rooms or classrooms with benches upstairs, where they studied, played and ate snacks that were brought up to them in laundry baskets … I couldn’t have joined them. One day I listened to them talking out on the soccer field. They were talking about sports and goals, about Biblical parables and piety in church … in fact it was neither the one nor the other, but some cross of the two. It was stupid and hypocritical.

Ham’s assistant lived in the butcher’s courtyard, in a little room over the stable. He was an Eagle, a member of the Slovene Lads. His red-stitched brown uniform, belt and hat with an impressive eagle’s feather hung from the wall. He played a small drum in the Slovene Lads’ brass band, and in the afternoons or evenings he would practice with his drumsticks on a piece of felt that he set over the drumhead, in order not to make too much noise. I told him that in the drumming school in Basel the beginners first practice on wooden footstools. That seemed to really interest him. He let me bang out all of Vogel Gryff … the introductory march of mardi gras in Basel. Only the piper was missing, so
I whistled along … He was really impressed with the rhythm, because it conveyed the melody even without the winds. He tried it himself and mastered it in no time … I went to visit Jože a number of times. You got to his room by a stairway … He was a nice, honest guy from a farming family. He trusted me and I him. There was a picture of his girl, Tončka, on his night table. He had Vati make a choker for her out of lamb’s hide. He had a stack of other photographs showing him with his band. He kept an army style revolver on the shelf in his wardrobe. A formidable caliber. He had brought it back from his service in the army. It was wrapped in a thousand sheets of newspaper. He let me hold it. I spun the barrel, causing the hammer to go “click! click!” With the bullets that he kept in the box next to it, I could have ripped the whole room to shreds and put holes in all the chimneys … Mr. Ham made a little fun of Jože, especially on Sundays when he would dress up in his Eagles uniform and, with his drum in a sling on his side and his drumsticks in a holster on his belt, head off to practice or a meeting of the Slovene Lads in town. But because he was such a good worker, it wouldn’t have occurred to Ham to fire him … He and Ham worked so well together, you would have thought they were both owls or falcons. Even the twins held their tongues around him … Jože and I once hitched a team to the delivery wagon with its tall sides and drove to the slaughterhouse … All the cows and even horses they had standing outside in pens under the acacias!… Inside there were big, cool rooms with white tile and red floors, perhaps so the blood wouldn’t be so visible … I watched them slaughtering cows, bulls, calves. The butchers were dressed in white from head to toe, with
masks over their mouths and noses like surgeons. Jože preferred not to look. He even turned his head away, toward the pegs in the coatroom. The butchers, all giants with faces as plump as women’s, grinned at him, not meanly, but in a way that showed they respected him … They killed the cattle with a rod that had electricity in it, or with a tube that shot out a little dart as thin as a needle. They looked for the place on their foreheads: bzzzz … and in an instant the animal, tied by the legs and horns, toppled onto its side … Sometimes it also staggered, each of its four legs separately, like a mardi gras horse with two men hidden inside who can’t agree whether to go straight or in a circle … The animal collapsed and stretched its head far forward … like a skull drying on the Sava’s gravel … At first I thought that it had passed out, but then I saw that it kept pressing farther down onto the floor, as though it wanted to sink through it. It really was dead … They dragged it off like a swollen carpet over the floor, to skin it … Then they sprayed water on the floor and brought in another. Sometimes an animal would resist … while it mooed they would shove it from behind with a kind of ram and pull it from in front by the rings in its nostrils. Sometimes the calves would bolt … and they would have to go chasing after them all through the hall … Meat and skins alike hung from hooks … like clothes in a closet … the horns, the hooves, bits of tail would be stacked up in the corners by individual butchers … Jože gave me a pail to collect hot blood in … they made a strong soup out of it … now and then I also got a piece of meat, some tripe, a soup bone … On Saturdays there would be crowds of poor people and women holding assorted pots standing out under the trees around
the slaughterhouse … You always got something, if not for free, then for not much money … At times I did fine as I watched the gigantic animals fall to the floor, as if hit by lightning … yes, this was proof that death was the same for all … at others the recollection of Liska, Dimka or the warm, sticky smell of blood drove me out under the acacias to vomit …

T
HAT FALL
we were penniless again. Summer and early fall, “die billige Gemüsenzeit,”
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were over … That table, both hammocks, the chairs … in one of them, which was upholstered, Gisela and I had our hiding place in a gap under a spring … everything we’d bought when we moved had made such a hole in the family’s wallet that we were still feeling it … In response to an ad that Vati had placed in the newspaper
Jutro
there had not been a single customer … Again we had to take groceries from Bojadamič on credit. Again we had to borrow to pay for heating fuel … we had long since given up on gas, which came through a coin-operated machine. The main room got its heat from the kitchen. That’s where we went to warm our hands and backs. When our mouths began watering unbearably, that’s when they sent me down at a gallop, list in hand, to the woman who sat in the newsstand … All I ever saw of this woman in her little witch’s hut were the downy wrinkles around her mouth or her hand when it pushed a pack of cigarettes toward me under the window … I compiled the list
myself, in cursive and Slovene translation as mother dictated it. According to it, we were pawning a rabbit fur … a fur hat … a choker … for so and so many dinars in credit. The lady unrolled the list that I had rolled into a scroll. Sometimes she gave me money for nothing, and sometimes she needed some enticing collateral. “Yes, the choker!” she said. I raced back upstairs and brought her the choker, made of angora rabbit fur and nicely wrapped in newsprint. She inspected it in the gloom of her little house and counted the money out onto the rubber mat … one, two, three … we counted together, out loud … Soon it transpired that she had more of Vati’s furs in her newsstand than tobacco and cigars … I immediately ran with the money and gunnysack to “Fuel” just several doors down the street. The rumor was that the owner of the company was a communist. The communists were on the side of the poor and wore red neckties, because they lusted for blood … When the salesman, who had his shoes wrapped in gunny sack on account of the cold, weighed the full bag out in the courtyard, the owner was always looking out the window of a sort of granary that loomed up high over the mountains of logs and the streets of stacked boards … He would run down and check to see if the scale wasn’t showing less than the actual weight of the bag … Vati came to meet me, so that we both carried it back. The bag was at least twice my size and so heavy that it made me stagger. Finally I almost had to carry both of them … the bag and him … up the steps, when he suddenly went pale and almost collapsed near the fence …

That fall mother finally found a friend … Mrs. Guček from Moste … a tiny, toothless woman in a broad-brimmed hat with thickly made-up
lips … She lived in an apartment building near the railroad crossing barrier. She told us about her son, who, when he was returning home from his military service, couldn’t wait to see her and instead of waiting to get off of the train at the station, jumped off the car at a ramp, breaking an arm and a leg. Her son was a little, powerful fellow with short hair, a baker by trade … Mother had met Mrs. Guček while out at the store buying buttons, and she brought her home … Mrs. Guček played a small clarinet, which she carried with her in her bag. In better times she had also played the piano … Vati couldn’t stand her. Nor could I … She wore thick knitted mittens on account of her sensitive hands. She never took her hat off … She spoke in fine phrases and with exquisite care. She’d had a very good education, we noticed that right away. Her father had been a corset and glove merchant … Before the great war he had had six employees. The door to his atelier was constantly opening or closing. He was wiped out in the financial scandal of some bank in Vienna. Her husband, a government official, Peter’s father, was dead … Everything that Mrs. Guček had to say turned into a wistful dream … She drank tea and often had supper with us, although she must have noticed that we didn’t have anything … Most of all she liked to take a spoon and scrape the scorched cornmeal mush or macaroni stuck together off the bottom of the pot, which was also what I liked to do and why mother always set it aside for me. So this made me resent her even more. But she did play the flute nicely. Like the early morning twitter of birds in the woods … the splash of water … a pan pipe … the sorrow of an abandoned girl … that’s how it sounded … She had a wide repertoire. She would sit on the barrel
with her legs crossed. Or right on a skin on the floor … She got more and more reckless. “What would you like?” she would ask. “Ein Walzer,” Clairi said. Sometimes she would mimic an entire ensemble, an orchestra or, with her hands cupped around her mouth, a trumpet … she kept time with her foot … “Cuckoo!” she would say to Gisela, who would be hiding under a blanket. Outdoors she would wear a veil. On account of her skin. She would come uninvited, out of the blue. She and mother spent a lot of time chatting, getting angry about things, crying together … she was ready to cry at the drop of a hat … She would talk about this and that, she knew a lot of people. And when she didn’t she would say, “The rumor is that …” She even knew the old lady who kept watch at her window to make sure I didn’t spill any water, as well as her stepdaughter, who would call her stepmother to the window the instant she saw me … About the bishop, who was fond of drink, which is why he was bloated and flushed all the time, and who also had … and from here on she whispered in mother’s ear, but so loudly that it thundered and I could hear everything: had women, nuns, the sisters, ladies from some of the better families … Despite the fact that she was annoying and made us angry and that we also laughed a lot at her expense, mother couldn’t get by without her … She told her about the theater, the opera, dances … she was very well-versed. Mother had a weakness for actors: once, in Basel in 1913, on the Elizabethplatz, she had had the actress Maria Petri as a boarder … and she still had photos of her … later she killed herself over an unhappy love affair … One evening Mrs. Guček napped in a hammock next to mother until eleven at night, when they both left for
the movies, a special showing just for adults that young people weren’t allowed to see … Mother came home at two in the morning, for the first time in her life and in a carriage, at that, which Mrs. Guček got for her through a friend who was a driver … All of us shot up in bed when the hitch stopped outside our house.