Newcomers (6 page)

W
HEN WE GOT TO A TREE
, we were in the deepest shadow. The path had suddenly narrowed and the water was gurgling very close by, as if somebody was brushing his teeth on the far side of the shrubs … Vati sparked a match from his little pack. In front of us was a huge cliff face, wide and black, looming progressively farther out over us the higher it reached up into the trees … With its belly it shoved the path out closer to the water, and us, too … Vati pressed close to
the rock face, he hugged it, and with the hand that he used to carry the suitcase, he lit a match … the tiny, useless flame of an innocent match from Basel illuminated his mud-encrusted face and the black cliff that was thrusting its chest out, but most of all a multitude of various kinds of leaves that came fluttering down like a waterfall … Suddenly Vati was gone from the cliff … “Wo bist du?”
^*
mother called out tearfully. He had vanished. “Vati!” I shouted. All we could hear was the crackle of branches and kerplunk … father was drowning amidst bushes and toads!… “Mama, Vati kommt um!”
^†
I hollered … Suddenly another little flame appeared … We saw Vati’s face above us, pale and with muddy streams of sweat running from the lenses of his eyeglasses on down … he was standing over a part of the path that had been washed out. He was carrying something … “Steine!”
^‡
he announced. He tossed them down onto the path beneath him, on the place where it went underwater … white, gray, round, square. Any second he was going to slip and fall … “Hast du dich verirrt?”
^§
mother asked. “Nein, nein,” he answered through clenched teeth. “Hier geht der richtige Weg ins Dorf.”
^‖
He climbed down, stepped on the stones and reached out his hand. “Gib mir die kleine Zwetschge.”
^a
I thought … all right, now Gisela was going to make
a ruckus, because she didn’t like Vati, who was always arguing with Clairi over her … But Gisela had character! She leaned forward and let him pick her up. For the first time ever father was carrying Gisela in his arms! Just imagine! He climbed up onto the far side of the path, which was veinous with roots, and set her down on the suitcase … Now it was mother’s turn. She was soaked through with sweat. She clung onto the rock face while it shook down a rain of leaves, as though they were being dumped out of a cloud … I shoved off after her, stepping over Vati’s stones, which were jutting out of the water. The path reached up to my chin, so they took hold of me and pulled me up and there I was, next to a tree that was half-entwined in clematis. Here the path was firmer, there were pines growing on both sides, and my stockings felt like bags full of mud … Nothing had been like I’d imagined it, but this dangerous path, that fearsome cliff, these raging waters … oh, this had been fun!

Now there were big, fat stones underfoot. The tree growth was below us and the river had split in two like a peaceful lake, but a little farther on still more jagged rock faces loomed … “Jetzt kommen wir in den Steinbruch,”
^b
Vati said. “Was?”
^c
Why on earth did mother have to shout back a question each time? I walked right behind her coat and Gisela, whose head hung over her shoulder, would tug at my hair … The path emerging from under mother’s feet refused to end. Suddenly it inclined downward, with rock faces rising on both sides.
They resembled high cliffs and the ground underneath them reflected gray triangles … Vati suddenly came to a stop. “Vorsichtig und ganz still - da ist das Zigeunerlager,”
^d
he whispered. We huddled closely together, seizing onto each other’s clothes and buttons, and Gisela kept hold of my hair … We stood there, each of us looking in a different direction, in case someone was about to attack us … Behind us was the stone chute, and up ahead of us the chute descended even farther into a chasm between cliffs … It was the quietest quiet. After a while we moved forward and down … the path leveled off and merged with rocks all around … Gray outlines stood pitched in all the shadowy corners – these were supposedly tents made of canvas. Inside them lurked Gypsies who weren’t as noble as Indians … I heard a high-pitched, giggling voice … “Pferde,” Vati explained. Indeed, I saw some shaggy shadows or other, the outline of a head … horses … and wheels, so those were their wagons. If they were going to attack us now, we were lost! My buttocks tightened and my heart held still. It became a tiny, hard nut. I knew that it could burst any second … The path unspooled along the bottom of the ravine … we lifted our legs at the knees, practically up to our chins … I couldn’t make out anything as we passed the tents … but I did pick up some revolting smell. “Verbranntes Schmalz,” mother whispered … Thank God, it was burnt tallow, at least something kitchen-related … But despite our precautions while walking, the stones underfoot began to crunch. This was a bad part of the trail. We were in a ravine that wasn’t just dangerous
at the bottom, but also up at the top. The path suddenly softened and rose … Vati began to ascend toward the sky … and I pressed my head toward mother’s back in order to leave all this nonsense behind me as soon as possible … until finally the vagabond path leveled out.

N
OW IT BECAME EASIER TO WALK
. There were no trees. Down below it was high water. It seemed as though we were walking on air … Still, the path had its own devilish ideas. From some rise it descended again … and when we finally reached the bottom where it became dark and forbidding, its dark soul snarled at us again. It leveled out and opened up and showed us a bland stretch leading up to … the end. There it confronted us with a small iron footbridge, beneath which the high water foamed and surged … An undeniably wild stream that a bit farther on emptied into a river. How to get over it?… We had to take care not to slip off the narrow iron walkway that kept getting sprayed from below … Vati went first and set down the suitcase … Then a second time, with Gisela. She didn’t cry out, so he wouldn’t lose his balance. Then he struck another match. Mother glided across like a ghost and kneeled down on the far side. As soon as I started out on the bridge, the froth from the stream engulfed my feet … and the bridge shook at all of its gaps, so that I would have preferred to slip off it into the depths than go on.… In any case, on the far side the meadow was even slushier and in places completely flooded, and the molehills jutted up out of the lakes like little fortresses made of sand … The river rushed off toward a bend, probably like
someplace in South America, and there wasn’t a single tree or bush beside it. I was able to walk alongside … Big, wide and taut as a road, it was possible to see across it to the other side, where there was a thick, dark forest … of pines and firs. Mother called out … “Ich habe den Schuh verloren!” She had lost a shoe … it was white. We had to go back over the squishy meadow all the way to the decisive stream. Planks … some sort of worm-eaten wooden troughs lay all around, half-filled with water. I inspected them and turned one of them over: don’t tell me these were once boats, bits of smashed river-going vessels? Excited as I was to discover it, the mud made exalted squishing sounds beneath my feet. Vati searched the waterfront and mother with him … Who was it they’d searched an entire country for to find the right foot to fit in a shoe?… I found it! It was lying heel up in a puddle, so it wasn’t obvious … I brought it to Cinderella. She shook the sand out of it and put it on right away … The meadow rose like a potica … At the end of it we came to a nice, dry sandy path that split in two: one path rose toward something white … probably some house or other … and the other, darker path went alongside a sort of forest of straw-like spears. “Das ist Kukurus,”
^*
Vati said. He didn’t know which path we should take. He lit a match. When it ignited, a cross with Jesus on an old lath appeared under a round tin roof. I noticed the drops of blood on his face under the crown of thorns and a bunch of flowers tucked in between the nails through his feet. So alone in the night, in a cold foreign land … Of course he wasn’t afraid, because he was the
Son of God and he had his Father in Heaven to protect him … It was really good that we had him for company now. “Ein Kruzifiks!” said mother … Vati shone a match on the first and second paths. “Ich gehe dorthin zu diesem Haus fragen,”
^†
he said. And indeed up he went to the white house, even though it could have been a trap. And indeed he knocked on the door … I heard knock! knock! on wood … and I even heard some human speech. I will never be so brave as to go wake a stranger in the middle of the night to ask a question … He came trudging back down in his squishing clothes and shoes … “Da hinauf müssen wir gehen,”
^‡
he said, pointing toward a deep, dark path through the cornstalks … Mother began whining again. “Ich werde die Schuhe ausziehen.”
^§
The mud on the path was black and greasy, a regular coal cream. I took my shoes off too and made contact with the cold mud through my stockings. At intervals Vati would light a match … but the mud got deeper the farther we went, as though it were continually being kneaded and then left to rise … I couldn’t go any farther in it … Vati began walking more closely alongside the corn, mother as well, so I tried walking on the grassy border to one side … I tripped and went flying and got covered in mud. So I tried going farther in among the corn … tall, knuckly reeds with dangling leaves, reminiscent of branched candelabras … Their fuzzy tails waved at the top, while something like hard bananas wrapped in straw husks jabbed at my face. It rustled and fluttered. I couldn’t see three feet
ahead of me for all the fragile spears jutting up. I kept running into them … they smelled raw … this was a regular Africa, a savannah overgrown with reeds … The earth was muddy here too, but at least had some sand … I held on tight to mother’s bag and sandals, but each time the leaves, the hard bananas with their threadlike mustaches slapped at my face … I ought to have a machete, like Ali in Timbuktu. It went slowly. Here and there some shoots, sharp tiny stumps, started to stab my feet in the sandy earth. I set the sandals down and stepped into them. Amid all the corn and constant rustling I could neither see nor hear anything. Suddenly I sensed I was alone. Then there was a mighty cracking sound through the stalks and an instant later I noticed something white and black like a mole hill … a monster went storming off right in front of me, it took off like a blacksmith’s hammer hurled up into the sky. I screamed for all I was worth and raced out of there … Mother and Vati were standing on a rise, they shone in the dark, and she was shouting desperately, “Bubi! Bubi!” … “Da bin ich!”
^‖

N
OW BOTH OF THEM
were walking comfortably alongside each other down a broad path, which I had all to myself. For the first time everything around us got quiet. Went mute. The trees, the river, the shrubs. Finally they got to see something that had left them dumbstruck. Oh, it wasn’t easy to surprise them!… Down below the gray water lay still. On the far side was the railway line … which led off into
the darkness … into the excitement of the wilderness … Now the path dissolved into a plain that was thickly strewn with big, white stones … Skulls with toothless jaws, egg-shaped balls with their ends gently set one on another … all crunched underfoot. Brrrr, brrrr, they tumbled aside … Were these ruins or a riverbed? It led uphill … toward railroad tracks alongside a forest, where a striped boom barrier jutted up in the air. A crossing! And almost directly across from it a fence … a long, skinny tree trunk that lay atop two meter-high forks stuck in the ground. And next to it Christ on the cross, with ordinary rosaries left in various glasses and cups. God was everywhere in the world, and without exception he ruled here too. Perhaps this country was even a little more pious than others, because they had Jesus outdoors, at night, in the open air … I could barely see anything due to sleepiness, but I knew that from the very first day here I was going to have to be much better behaved than I had ever been up till now … Vati lit a match. Beyond the fence there was a meadow … so big that wherever you looked, green showed through the shadows. “So, jetzt sind wir angekommen,”
^*
he said. He lifted the trunk off its forks as coolly as though it were the lattice gate on a cowboy ranch …