Newcomers (12 page)

One day Vati finally moved. He had found a job at the headquarters of the Elite Company in Ljubljana. He had also found a room. He left on a Sunday evening. He promised to come back every Saturday and bring his week’s wages. Or send it by mail. It wouldn’t be much, since he would have to deduct his room and board … He also took his
wicker suitcase with him on the train. That’s where he kept his hides and the last of his furs from Basel. He would use these to sleep on, since the room he was renting was unfurnished, because that way it was much cheaper. But in his free time, he said, he was going to sew muffs out of animal skins, fur hats, collars … whatever the world wanted of fashion at the moment, and he would sell them from door to door …

Now mother, Gisela, and I were alone … without him. Mother told me, “Du mußt slowenisch lernen, daß wir uns mit den Stritzen besser verstehen.”
^d
Of course I wanted to, but … On Monday morning there was a lock on the well, so that we wouldn’t be tempted to draw water out of it in spite of the ban … Consequently, every morning I went first thing down to the spring, so that I wouldn’t run into anybody. At first with a bucket, then with a bowl, and finally with bottles … I had to put up a healthy supply … who could say what Karel would think up that day … he might, for instance, lock us into the house, or he might lock us out of it … The water flowed between two marly stones … and was as pure as crystal … with a little fish swimming in it every now and then … you had to be careful not to dirty the water … Now and then the woodsman came walking across the footbridge. He was a muscular, red-cheeked, gray-haired man. He wore a kind of gray uniform with a green stripe on his knickers. He tended the forests alongside the railway line all the way to the end or the start of the Krka. This well, which everyone was welcome to draw from, was also his … 
He stepped across the narrow footbridge in his leather leggings. I pretended not to have seen him. In our room mother cooked on a small round stove. She was short of lard … and she didn’t want to subject herself to the humiliation of asking Karel for more. Neither did I. I just knew when I needed to head out to pasture … with Liska, and Gray … and when I needed to clean out the barn. That was all. I snuck into the kitchen. With a spoon I swiped a bit of lard out of the cupboard in the entryway and evened out its surface at the top of the black pot. And if they did notice … then it could also have been rats, which had already consumed a quarter of what was up in the attic, anyway … Mother stayed in our room and constantly complained. She would pace back and forth, nervously balling her hands into fists. “Warum sind wir hierhergekommen … Warum sind wir nicht nach Saarbrücken gegangen, zu meinen Brüdern nach Saarlouis. Was für ein Dasein! Was für ein Misgeschick!”
^e
I couldn’t stand to listen to it anymore. Everywhere we had been, she had just complained … in Basel … in our upper floor room in the Gerbergässli … in the old house next to the park with the police station in it … in the nice building next to the Christian brothers’ school … on the Elizabethplatz … in the rue Helder … even the rue de Bourg, where we had a whole floor to ourselves …

S
HE WROTE
to Neunkirchen, Saarbrücken and Saarlouis asking for help. To her sisters, her brothers … That’s where she was born, that
was her home, she knew all the people there, had gone to school and grown up with them … She would tell me about that place … and it hovered in a sort of cloud in my head. A small town with red roofs … a big central square … the nine towers of Neunkirchen on the horizon … Her mother was French with the surname of Fraigunau, her father was German, a tailor named Faist. They’d had twenty children. This was because her mother would always send her after her father, so she knew where he was. And why did she have to go after her father? To get him to come home? Yes, exactly!… She had nineteen brothers and sisters. And in addition they had five tailor’s assistants and a maid in the house. On Sundays when they went to church, all the men – her father, brothers, and the assistants – were identically dressed and likewise all the women – her mother, sisters and the maid … “Da kommt die Faistkompagnie heranmarschiert …,”
^*
people would say … They had a big house and out front it had a sign that said “Adolf Faist, Tailor …” And in the back there was a terrace … embroidered curtains and everywhere little cushions and pillows … That’s where she and her brothers and sisters would gather, that’s where they played and laughed their way through so many things. Oh, the games they had played and the pranks they had pulled!… As a little girl she had a special box where she kept a globe, a pencil, and a pretty little cask. The cask was her secret and she showed it to nobody. Once she lost it and couldn’t find it again. She cried and was disconsolate for a full year … The fact that she had once been a little girl intrigued me most
of all … She also had a photograph of herself from then, taken at her confirmation … a browned image on cardboard, with the name of the photographer written in silver. She was kneeling at a prie-dieu, with her prayer book bound in white leather lying open atop it. She herself was dressed all in white with a veil gathered in a bunch on her head and a cross made of cypress wood hanging around her neck … Her face, which was younger than mine, already showed features of the woman she would grow up to be … This girl, who was roughly my age, had given me birth – not this woman standing next to me now … I studied the girl’s face, her eyes, her little nose, her mouth, her hands gloved up to the elbow … At the age when this was taken, even though she was already a first communicant, she would have played with me and understood me. Just think what time had done since then, when she was perched on her knees on a prie-dieu with the arch of an old-fashioned door in the white background … Time had galloped off with her like a horse through all kinds of misty landscapes and set her down here … In her accounts of that time you could hear the silken rustle of their satiny clothing, the kerchiefs and Brussels lace, which was so delicate that the slightest gust would carry it off the terrace and into the neighbor’s garden … Her father had been a good and fair man. In his photo he had a mustache but also seemed gentle in his high stand-up collar. Her mother was a stout woman and wore a ribbon around her neck with a small watch hanging from it. Both pictures were gray, rough and murky, probably because both of them had died long ago … Then there were photos of a brother, a soldier wearing a Pickelhaube who had fallen in the war, a sister at her
wedding, and her oldest brother, Hagedorn, who ever since 1900 had been a wild game hunter in India and wore a helmet made out of cork … Soon came the time when mother got engaged. He had been a non-commissioned officer with red hair, the cashier of some unit in Saarlouis … “Ein Kassiermeister. Er sorgte für die Geldkasse seines Regiments,”
^†
mother said. I got the impression she still thought about him. “Er war immer ein so betrübter Mensch,”
^‡
she said. I imagined him in his green uniform carrying a metal cash register under one arm … such a giant that his head nearly touched the ceiling … She had told me about him so many times that I already understood she was secretly still bound to him … It’s best to be nineteen or twenty years old, she would say … If she had married the army cashier, he would probably be my father now … and I would have been born into a completely different family … and would be looking through some other window than this one, with its view of a growing dung heap and the Krka … I would be sitting in some other room, which would be warm, with other furniture, in another city … in a city with red roofs and nine churches … where a little bell would jingle and I would go downstairs into a dimly lit dining room for supper, where other sisters and other brothers would be sitting around a table covered with a white tablecloth … all of them unborn … “Und dann kam dein Vater,”
^§
mother said. Yes, Vati had turned up in the course of his second trip to Saarlouis … he had come from these parts here … and
as a certified tailor got a job working for Lisbeth’s father … Things grew dark in this part of the story – as though some black shadow came out of a narrow side street and crossed the main square toward the big house on its far side. Vati! He who would henceforth be at fault for everything. The lout who understood nothing. The egotist!… He was a short, thin, pale young man with very bushy hair and dressed like a dandy … Tight-lipped. And he worked from morning to night in the workshop. Anyone could easily imagine what he’d been like … “Was wahr ist ist wahr … er war ein braver Arbeiter. Aber als Mensch …”
^‖
He fell in love with her and wanted to get married … but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him … She was in love with her non-commissioned officer … Vati went chasing after her all through the house and town … “Er jagte mich durch das ganze Haus, er griff immer nach meiner Hand, ich lief die Treppe hinauf zu meinen Brüdern und Schwestern. Wir lachten über ihn …”
^a
That part was really unnecessary. That part really hurt! Thank God her father was smarter than her. Because Vati was a conscientious and exceptionally talented worker, he ordered her to be a lot nicer to him from then on … She had to go out with him for walks around town, down the avenue, to dances, and she remembered one Sunday as they were walking down some side-street two women at windows up above saying to each other, “Schau was dort für ein häßlicher Mann
mit der Lisbeth geht.”
^b
 … My God, how ashamed she was. Only tall, stout, powerful men counted as handsome and trustworthy in those days, and he was such an unappealing little scarecrow … I couldn’t swallow this. Not just because I felt sorry for him, but because it wasn’t true! Sure, he was quiet, and thin. But he was also handsome! All you had to do was look at him … A great head of hair, a really fine face … and a lissome build … “Ja, heute ist er schöner, als er damals war, jetzt bin ich abscheulich …,”
^c
she said. Robert, her paymaster beau, was still counting on her … How was that? Well, they still got together once a week under the arch of some side street. He would stand there and wait for her every day, whether she came or not. Each day she had just a ten-minute window. “Und nachdem kam es zu einer Tragödie …”
^d
What tragedy? How?… Robert came under suspicion of having misappropriated his regiment’s money, which in fact he hadn’t done. He killed himself. How? “Ich weiß nichts mehr …”
^e
She got married to Vati and then moved into a small apartment in a suburb of Neunkirchen. At the beginning they supported themselves by sewing buttons onto military uniforms. Every week a cart with buttonless uniforms stopped at their door and every week it left and returned to the barracks with a cart full of uniforms with the buttons sewed on … Then they moved to Belgium in search of more remunerative work, and that’s where Clairi was born, in Brussels in 1910. Two years after
that they took little Clairi and moved to Basel. Things weren’t much better there … Vati took on a lot of short-term jobs while she let out rooms to boarders … she only rented to opera performers, including the famous singer Maria Petri, who later committed suicide. Then they rented a house with a store on Rue della Couronne. In 1914 … “Es war damals gerade ein paar Tage vor dem Kriege …”
^f
Swiss Germans marched through Basel, breaking display windows and shouting against the Serbs. They came to Rue della Couronne and demolished the whole house, the store, and beat up Vati … In 1916 Margrit was born … I saw a photo taken during mardi gras when both girls attended a masquerade party disguised as a Gypsy couple, one taller, the other shorter, with tambourines and wearing big earrings … Both of them had mother’s nose, but only Margrit had inherited Vati’s eyes. There was also a photo of mother and Vati with little Clairi when she was four years old and they’d just moved to Basel. Vati was seated in a chair looking pleasant and young, while mother sat in another chair already looking older, with her hair done up in something that looked like a two-headed pillow … The time when they really started to make money came after the war … when Hagedorn arrived in Europe from India … and they worked out a deal where he would send them the finest furs for half price. Vati passed an exam qualifying him as a master furrier. Their assets began to grow … a house and two stores … half-page advertisements in the newspapers … their own stand at the international “Kürschnermesse”
^g
in Leipzig in 1925, a phonograph with a
horn, a violin and piano for the girls … Clairi and Margrit began going to their first dances … If only father had been a better manager … but he just perched in his workroom and sewed … he didn’t like mixing in company, he didn’t want to join the “Gewerbekammer”
^h
 … it was something important if you were a member of it … he declined Swiss citizenship because he wanted to move back to his homeland … And the money! Somebody came from the Yugoslav embassy to ask him to donate to help build a Yugoslav club and then disappeared with the money. It amounted to a lot of franks … And then all the money he paid up front to suppliers! In 1928 I entered the picture. This was the part that most interested me!… Though he was up to his ears in debt, Vati was practically delirious with joy … that day he flew through the workshop, overturning tables and shouting, “Ein Bub! Ein Bub! Einen Sohn habe ich bekommen!”
ⁱ
 … It warmed my heart to hear it. Because I was German on mother’s side and Slovene on his, he wanted to give me a special name beside his own. Samson is what they entered in the baptismal certificate … “Und dann kam es zur Überraschung!”
^j
Namely, the great crisis of 1929 … when everything went wrong … and that was it for the house, the store, Gritli’s and Clairi’s parties … and they were back to trying to earn enough just to live … “Und du warst ein großer Lümmel und dann zwei Jahre krank,”
^k
she said … First Hagedorn died and then all of the other siblings but four … “Ich
weiß nicht, ob jemand überhaupt noch lebt …”
^l
She asked them to help, composed a long letter – as thick as a pillow … she was one of the oldest children and in Saarlouis had always had to look after the younger ones … At last she actually sent the letter but never got a response. Nor did the letter itself get returned to sender … Now she always had to wait for Vati to come back or for him to send money before she could buy stamps. But even then she would hesitate before dropping them in the mailbox, because at bottom she didn’t expect any answer … “Gewiß sind sie alle unter diesem blöden Hitler gestorben oder verreist …”
^m