Newcomers (31 page)

The next day I went to sit by the warehouse door. When they didn’t come, I climbed up on the wall across from their business. The wall there formed a kind of box or balcony looking out over the Ljubljanica. Inside the box was a cart chained to a young willow tree that grew there … My friends slept late, until eight or nine … After that I couldn’t hold out anymore. I went down Locksmith Lane and called to them through a street-level window that had an iron grate over it … The room would have been bare if it hadn’t had wardrobes against the walls … They slept together on a narrow, brown bed in the corner … two steps away from the big double bed that their mother and both sisters slept in … I sent a big rooster parading around in their room … Finally they heard me. They dug themselves out from under their blankets, where they’d been sleeping in their swimsuits, which inspired me, because mother had always forced me to put on one of her old slips overnight … They washed next to a bucket in the vestibule, then came outside to the wall … I felt badly only on account of the women … I assumed they must be completely different from mother, Clairi, and Margrit … I took care not to embarrass them.
Silva … a broad-hipped, diligent, boring woman … I had nothing to do with her … But Ivka! Whenever she poked her disheveled head out of the covers at my muffled whistle … she also slept in her swimsuit … I would freeze … She was like Karel in almost every respect. Exactly the same triangular face, the jutting cheekbones … the same thin, taut, pinkish skin … but especially the same sharp, gray, glaring eyes the color of slate … Now and then she would toss me a look or mumble something through her thin, pursed lips … something nasty, insulting, mean … at my expense, naturally … The feeling I developed toward her was similar to what I felt about Karel … except that it was so complicated and high up somewhere, as though it unfolded on top of some mountains where my eyes couldn’t reach … I sensed a chilly revulsion … I would have given just about anything to be able to change that disdain in her eyes at least into indifference … Once when I walked into the vestibule by mistake when she was there washing her armpits by the bucket, I froze in fear of having perhaps embarrassed her … But she just kept washing as if I weren’t there, and even though I calmed down, the feeling that I had simply been blotted out was surprisingly unbearable … I would have preferred it if she’d yelled at me … But then, she didn’t pay much heed to other people, either … not to her sister, not to her mother … she and Karel communicated with little more than a short word or a gesture … probably because they were almost twins … The only time I saw her laugh was when her oldest brother, who was a barber, came to visit … She laughed aloud at his jokes … The oldest brother was a skinny, pale, dark-haired man with a haircut like Tarzan’s, always artistically dressed … in a light
blue sport coat with a scarf around his neck that was tucked into his checkered shirt … While he told jokes and everyone laughed, with one hand he would give Karel and Ivan, who were begging him, coins from his pocket which was so full of change that it weighed his elegant jacket down, while with the other hand he kept constantly running a comb through his hair …

When Ivan and Karel came out, we would go one place or another. “Vehr to?” I would ask. I would look at Karel, because Ivan responded to everything with equal enthusiasm, no matter what somebody proposed … Karel wouldn’t answer at all … My attachment to him grew as fast as my revulsion … only occasionally would the antipathy lag. I perceived his proximity … from his head to his toes, from his eyes to his long pants belt that always flapped over his knee … as serious, precious, and unbearably annoying … Had he done anything to me? Not a thing! Had he done anything bad? No! But one day he would, and I had to get ready for that … Gisela, whom I brought with me once to the embankment, talked and played with him as though he were air. I envied her that she could relate to him that way.

We went from the antique stores toward Žabjak and Breg streets … that was a dangerous neighborhood, that’s where boys hung out who were stronger or at least more numerous than the three of us … You had to stay alert. One of those guys could come dog your heels, and if you didn’t pay attention or turn around fast enough, he could give you a kick … Karel and Ivan said that they were always invading the embankment, but if you just stepped on their territory, you’d get a rock thrown at you or delivered by slingshot. Ivan showed me where
his legs had been hammered by projectiles … As soon as they hit you, they shout, “We declare war on you!” … and you have to beat it as fast as your feet will go … You have to do something so those wise guys stop harassing you or invading the embankment at the drop of a hat … An army ought to be formed that includes all the boys who live on that side of the water and nearby. If we have our own units, then nobody will ever dare touch any of us again, no matter if we go down to Trnovo or Žabjak or up to the castle … Creating an army on the embankment, I sensed, would be the secret glue that would bind our friendship together most tightly of all … I would have to think about that some more …

At that time we would go visit the public market … now and then some vendor or shopper would give you an apple … or we would climb down the ladders at the Triple Bridge to get to the gravel riverbed. Karel would slowly climb down the rungs one foot at a time, clinging to the ladder like a girl … it gratified me to see that … We undressed and waded through the shallow water to those catacombs under the road that used to be a dock in olden times … We drove the fish ahead of us and would try to bludgeon them with paving stones … Sometimes we succeeded, but the fish stank too much of the Ljubljanica and sludge … So instead we went looking for valuable objects on the bottom … once we found a burnt-out compressor that was as heavy as a steel cash register … When I went back to the gravel, I avoided the heap with Karel’s pants, belt and undershirt, as if he were still in them … I felt as though I would get stung or catch something … Every day I would strain to think of shortcuts or detours
I could propose to strengthen our friendship … At home in the evenings I would make plans for the next day in feverish excitement … all kinds of imaginative games … I would consult with myself about what direction to head out in … what entertaining things we could try … what I would tell them about myself and about Basel, and what I wouldn’t … what games we would play … to the extent possible ones that I’d invented when I was all alone and had no playmates … The closer the time for us to meet, the higher my temperature would get, and when we met, I would become like someone possessed. In those few short hours that we were together I had to try out all those games I had invented and planned. My fear that it would soon be evening and I would have to go home intensified the wild pace of the games and ideas … But my apprehension about the short-lived nature of our fun sometimes took all the fun out of it. Besides that, I had to keep the reins on myself so that I wouldn’t go completely out of control and turn into a tyrant … Karel remained unfazed … Just when I thought that we understood each other best, I would be filled with the greatest revulsion and hatred for his hidden aggression, which I couldn’t flush out of him. Most of all I would have liked to do some irreparably nasty thing to him … punch him in the nose, which would have been least hard of all. Once, for fun, we tried wrestling. I could have whipped him like a pussycat, even though he was older, and pinned him to the ground, if I hadn’t always had second thoughts at the last minute about the force of some hold or blow … When he fell, I didn’t leap on his chest and force his wrists to the ground … The thought of touching his skin and his bones repulsed me … What
sense did victory have if it was like a defeat? The tension stayed in the air like a burnt smell. But I couldn’t have parted ways with him and I was haunted by the fear that some day I might actually offend him. Ivan, however … he was a caricature of Karel. With him Karel’s sharp voice and disdainful laugh turned into a kind of hiccup and grin from ear to ear …

One day as we were headed to the public market, some delinquent from Breg started pelting us with rotten apples. Outside the bookstore there was a heap of tomatoes gone bad that the green grocers had dumped into the sewer … I flung my first bomb, a tomato, at our attacker … and hit a priest … the cathedral canon dressed in a violet clerical vest … just as he was about to go across the square … when I turned around, Ivan and Karel were nowhere in sight. I could see that the tomato had exploded on hitting the priest’s head, and because of the red juice running down him, I couldn’t tell if I’d drawn blood or not … I bounded around the edge of the square toward the butchers’ stands and the Dragon Bridge, when I suddenly noticed that a long-legged produce vendor in a blue apron and a leather cap whom I knew by sight from the fruit market was following me … I had to avoid a crowd, but he was faster and latched onto me just under the first dragon … “I’ll show you to steal from me! Let’s go!” he shouted for all to hear, spun me around and with his hand on my neck propelled me back past the wooden stands and benches to his fruit stand. “You stole my money!” he said once he had shoved me in among his empty crates. I was surprised. “I titn’t zteal anysink,” I said. But I knew it was futile to plead innocent. He searched me … 
my trousers, pockets, shirt, belt … my buttons went flying … He shouted for a policeman, but there were none close by … He wrote down my name and address in the notepad that he used to add up customers’ purchases … When he let me go, I didn’t budge … “I titn’t zteal!” I howled at him. “Scram!” he leapt at me again with his huge shoes. “I titn’t zteal, you cherk!” I repeated. At that point he lost all control and was on top of me with all fours in an instant, in his shoes and his felt gloves …

O
NE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS
now was to establish our own army on the embankment … Ivan made the rounds of all the houses on the embankment, Town Square and Jail Road to summon all the boys who could conceivably join our army. The assembly point was next to the cart by the wall. The first to show up was Franci, who delivered the
Morning
door to door and had raced past us on the embankment several times with his newspaper bag. He was a pretty solid kid. Even in the middle of summer he had a runny nose from the dust and drafts in the buildings where he delivered the paper … His trickle of snot would harden into putty. For fun he would dig it out and swallow it without batting an eye. Not only that, but he smelled of mush gone sour. He infected everything with his smell … even the trees and the grass … He had an older brother and a grandmother. He lived on the top floor of the last house on the embankment, which had a furniture and carpet store on the ground floor. His grandmother was sick and couldn’t leave the house. And on top of that she was quite
cranky. When no one was home, he and his brother would have to tie her up so she wouldn’t do anything to herself. Once he showed her to me: she was sitting tied with rags to an armchair, so she wouldn’t fall out the big attic window that she always looked out of toward the dead end of Frog Lane and the Harbor Inn restaurant. His brother could have been twenty or maybe fifty. He was a little daft. He did things to help out the sexton of the cathedral … he swept the courtyard of the bishop’s residence, watered the palms in big pots, and in the mornings he delivered the
Slovene
. The two of them took great care to make sure nobody in the bishop’s residence found out that his younger brother delivered the
Morning
, and to that end Franci only delivered his newspapers on the left bank of the Ljubljanica. Metod, his brother, was a fright to look at. Flushed, blond, with a big mouth that gaped like a fresh, wet wound, full of crooked teeth and bared gums … He spent his free time in the afternoons at the Harbor Inn, from where he could keep an eye on their grandmother … The Harbor Inn was a huge tavern consisting of just a single room in the shape of a big letter L, with a gigantic rustic stove at each end. It was where produce vendors, storekeepers, Dalmatian Croats, newspaper salesmen and delivery boys, drunks, Greta Garbo from outside the main post office, idiots and petty thieves liked to drink … once I just walked into the place … it was a real hellhole … the long room with its huge rustic stove on which drunkards were lying, and a gigantic bar that was thick with smoke and people … in that rubbish heap they played the accordion, whooped it up, clobbered each other, sang … some of them even slept there. The mute violinist whom I’d run into on
Fridays when I went begging with Mirko and his mother would also be in the ostaria, playing … Franci was strong on account of constantly carrying his heavy bag, which had made one of his shoulders lower than the other … But he was a coward. You couldn’t count on him at all. No sooner would you turn to him with a serious request than he would vanish, evaporating like dew off the grass on account of some other obligation …

The next one who joined us was Marko, who lived over a shoe store near me on Town Square. He was a little kid with such gentle eyes framed by a pale face that they were really, as books used to say, reminiscent of violets … something unreal, like out of a fairy tale … He brought along his little sister Tončka, who was four years older than Gisela, chubby, with tiny eyes that would melt away behind her high, puffy cheeks. When she decided she wanted a toy watch like the one she saw on Gisela’s wrist, I gave her the other one that I’d stolen from Velikonja … Marko’s family tended a goat in the woodshed behind their house. The boy once brought it along on a rope and it proceeded to graze around the lindens and the wall. We hitched it to the Prinčičes’ hand wagon, which we loaded with rocks. That’s when the idea of a battle wagon came to me that we could use in our attacks.

Firant came from the prettiest house on Jail Lane. He was a nervous, volatile boy like me. Right from the start something like fear, mystery, attraction, repulsion and pleasure reigned between us, as between two opponents facing each other in the front line of battle. Friendship was not possible. I was aggressive and so was he. The very way he walked and held himself was like an attack. He would drag one leg behind
him, glance up at you with his head bent down, clench his fists. His otherwise collapsed face had a big mouth and a bony, jutting jaw, like gangsters in comic strips. The first thing he did when he joined us at the wall was to call me a German and challenge me to a fight. He wanted to know which of us was stronger. I wanted to find out, too. After a few initial feints we had each other by the shoulders. He won because, it seemed to me, he had reserves of some hidden, vicious strength. And also because he was fierce. In the second round I pinned him to the ground. He looked around angrily, with lots of white showing in his sunken eyes. The third round was a draw. The thing that got on my nerves most about him were his lower front teeth, his incisors, which stood out from the others and caused him to lisp … I felt like knocking them, along with his jaw, back into his gullet. In spite of it all, he invited me over to his house, where his father worked as a women’s tailor. We walked up the artfully winding stairs, where there was a potted palm on every window ledge … all the way to the top, to the attic over the fifth floor. For me this was one more proof that annoying people always lived in the nicest surroundings. His father, who was constantly beating Drago with his belt, was a powerful, tough, curly haired fellow who looked like a priest in civilian clothes, while his mother was tiny, just skin and bones. There were colorful rags and swatches lying all over the kitchen floor that muffled your footsteps. Firant had his bed in the kitchen in a sort of alcove right next to his parents’ bedroom door … At night he sometimes heard what his mother and father were doing in their bedroom, moaning and making the bed squeak as they fucked. He talked about it so calmly that it amazed
me, but then again not. He opened the door and showed it to me. In the middle of the room was a big double bed that in my imagination ever since then has stood for continual lust and delight. Next to the bed was a bassinet with an infant bawling in it, his little brother. My God, how he must have enjoyed hearing all that right next to him. He described it to me in detail … Then one time next to the cart he solemnly promised us that he would take us all there some Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon to listen and watch through the keyhole as the two of them, Davorin and Pepca, his parents, did it in their bedroom … But despite all this directness he was quite sneaky. You could sense how pumped full of deviousness he was and you could practically feel it leaking out of his mouth like hot air. You had to be careful around him, because he was always resentful about something and balling his fists. You also had to be pretty dumb if you decided to go look at heaven with him …