Newcomers (17 page)

I watched Vati while he shaved, washed from a bucket and put on a celluloid collar. He and Clairi took off for town. To the Elite factory. Just for one day, so she could help him catch up on his backlog … Once they left, we could move quite comfortably around the room … But I ran after them. So I could see more! I walked with them to the intersection of two roads, where there was a smithy in some courtyard and a light affixed to a telegraph pole … They were going down the
main road that led straight past fields of grain and clover into town … From there I saw the castle on the hill again, as I had a year before. The grayish brown walls with the square tower and green cupola and the bell tower of who knows what church down below.… Here on the righthand side there was a wall running through the wheat and potato fields into the distance. A path past a gravel pit that had a wheelless wooden wagon in it led that direction. Crosses and tombstones jutted up over the wall. So this was a cemetery …

But the most unusual thing of all was the air, which shimmered … It smelled of water, which must have been flowing full force and in huge quantities through some riverbed somewhere close by … It smelled of the rocks and vegetation that must grow there. Was this why the trees quavered in the air like reflections in water? Some sort of noise surrounded my head on account of it: everything shimmered, moved, trembled, scratched, swarmed, repeatedly making contact in a repeating vision … As though instead of the treetops there was a creature perched on the trees … nature itself, with the folds of its vegetation exposed on all sides … There, in that wet field, in the dense shadow of the trees on the far side of the pond, I was suddenly on some separate planet: quiet, light, mute, unhearing, with no resonance and no echo … How was this possible? As though this was no longer me … This quiet space was somehow contained between the corner of a small stand of forest and a gap in the hedge where, beginning on the far side of a small bench, some quarried rocks lay scattered alongside the road: but from there on, beginning at a house with no stucco and the same gravel pit where I’d seen the gray
wagon, that noise and the shimmering of the clear air came back and enveloped me …

Mother rearranged our room. It was five paces from the door to the window and two and a half paces across. The window was big and the walls were blue, with little flowers on them … From now on all four of us were going to sleep in the bed, she said, and Vati would have the table. The stove that was there had outlived its usefulness. A small cooktop with at least two burners and an exhaust pipe for the oven would need to be bought at a rummage store. A chiffon curtain would need to be sewn for over the window … So we wouldn’t have to constantly be going out and in, we would keep a bucket full of fresh water in the room. Its place would be here by the door. Bubi, you are going to look in the woods for a short stump or something similar that we can set the bucket on. Whether or not there was a woodshed we didn’t yet know, so we were going to keep a stack of wood here in the corner and under the stove. Our clothes and underwear would stay in the suitcase for now. We would nail several catches to the door … We would have to be careful in the toilet. It was just a latrine! Each tenant had to clean it once a month with a poker on a pole. So … “Ihr zwei müßt brav sein,” she impressed on us. “Mit niemandem reden, außer das notwendigste. Keinem etwas erzählen über unser Leben. Mit niemandem eine zu große Freundschaft schließen! Still und anständig sich benehmen. Die Leute in Ruhe lassen.”
^†
Gisela, who
sat on the bed, washed and brushed and happy, was impossible to stop. Even if she did get into mischief, anybody would have forgiven her. It warmed everyone’s heart just to see her. She was like a daisy gleaming in the grass … “Now to the water hole,” mother decided. So out the door … and to the well for water … into that glorious world I had no idea how to navigate. On tiptoe? On my head? On my hands? When you still don’t have any idea to what or to whom you’re going to belong … Clatter! I set the bucket down on the drain and took hold of a pole hanging down from the handle. Screeeaaaa … it squeaked … it squealed all through the courtyard, the garden, the forest, the sky … I stood there petrified … Already I’d committed my first transgression against peace on earth …

T
HERE WAS NEVER A LIGHT
on in the vestibule. Steps led from it into the courtyard. I flew over these one-two-three when the baker came calling in the morning, “Kaiser rolls! Sesame rolls! Bread loaves! Baguettes! Croissants!…” The baker was a little man riding a bicycle. With a huge basket on his back and a slightly smaller one over the handlebars … He pulled a cloth off the basket to reveal thin loaves jutting up like lances among the croissants and rolls. I bought a small loaf of cornbread for two dinars … Every morning he pulled up like this outside our courtyard door and announced himself. As though he were paying a call at some landed estate … Who all lived in this building?

At the far end of the vestibule, in a slightly larger room next door to ours, lived a young dark-haired woman with her son named Enrico.
Her husband, a mason, built houses all over the country and was seldom at home. All three of them had fled the Littoral after Mussolini came to power, settling in Ljubljana. Enrico, who was a sickly boy, knew Slovene only slightly better than I did, but he spoke it as if he were singing a song, which made it harder to understand him. At first he didn’t like me, because he thought we were Germans, and Mussolini was great friends with Hitler. Then that got straightened out. He began coming out to the woods where I would spend time. Most often at lunchtime, carrying his plate, which was laden down with delicacies he wanted to share with me. The best food of all was little fried bits of polenta. Like me, Enrico was a little mixed up from their move … He hadn’t found his bearings and he was afraid. He didn’t know where to go to find friends, and so, for the most part, he stayed at home with his mother, shut away in their room. There he drew and read out loud to her from comic books in Italian, while she, always beautifully dressed, knitted or ironed … Across from us in a room with a kitchen that had a proper brick stove, lived a many-headed family named Baloh. Father and mother with six daughters and sons. All of them heavy-set, pimply, with low foreheads and dense jungles of hair, and very pious. Every evening when the Ave rang at the cemetery, they would pray their rosaries aloud, kneeling around the stove in their kitchen. You could hear the murmur through the door, as though in a church … Outside, in the courtyard, an old woman, formerly a waitress, lived with her young, pretty daughter in a tarpaper shack … That was everyone … Except for the owner, a former naval officer, and his housekeeper. Looking in through his window from the road you could
clearly see a gold compass, a ship’s wheel, and ship’s rigging hanging in his nicer room … Wearing a white cap, his servant cooked, cleaned and took care of him … In the mornings he came out into his garden down a staircase with a railing that had a stone ball on it … dressed in a robe that was only a shade less blue than the house … An utterly white, thin, old gentleman with sparse hair, wearing a white cap with a celluloid visor. Even his eyes were blue, as were the lenses of his sunglasses … He carried motorized model boats in one arm … little cruisers and destroyers … At the pond he would set them down in the water … That was interesting, but I could only watch from a distance, from behind some flowers … Other times he would come out without anything … taking a seat in a chaise longue in the gazebo, where his maid in the cap would serve him at a small table. The first time I saw him, I had the feeling that it might be Mr. Perme, his embroidered robe or something else about him that caused that noise and shimmering in the air … Vati introduced us one Sunday morning. When he heard the footsteps coming down the stairs, he called us, “So! Jetzt!” And all of us went over to where that ball was at the bottom of the staircase railing. Vati was a little nervous. Mr. Perme stopped in his tracks. He spoke like an officer. In short, abrupt sentences, to the point. We were not to play on the sandy paths, he said, looking at Gisela and me with his slightly faded blue eyes … And if we did, we were to rake the sand every evening before we went in … If we wanted to pull some weeds, he said, we would get apricots as a reward … The forest, over there on the far side of the lime pit, was for playing in. Then he came to the bottom of the steps and shook hands with each of us … And though
he smelled of perfume and was all silky smooth in his embroidered robe and smooth shaven underneath his white cap, somehow or other he seemed less clean to me than the peasants in Cegelnica …

So we played in the forest. The Baloh boys and girls went there, too. All of them strong, healthy, and wild. The nicest among them was stocky Štef, whom I made friends with because he was so bold. Of course, Enrico also came here, although somewhat reluctantly because of the large number of kids. Then there were the three Pestotnik urchins from a tall, half-completed building that was going up practically in the forest. They were members of the Falcons. Sometimes they would come racing out of their construction site wearing their red costumes or colorful soccer uniforms. The Balohs were Eagles and soon they would spend whole days debating with the other three … At the sound of a whistle all of them would leap at a ball, pounding the muddy ground for all they were worth, jostling with each other and slapping mud into their mouths and eyes … Some people who lived in their own handsome houses down on the road that led toward Ljubljana also belonged to the Falcons … I had already seen the pretty lace curtains that hung in their windows, and had once even heard a real piano being played there. Imagine that!… Two pale, freckled, red-haired boys who were nearly identical would also show up. They lived in the unplastered house next to the gravel pit and their last name was Jaklič. Quick, nervous, and as variable as the weather. Then there was easy-going, lazy Mirko, who lived with his mother in that wooden wagon at the bottom of the gravel pit. Then two blond boys named Slabe, with noses like boxers, who came from a long, one-story house
a little farther on from the Jakličes. Their father, a scrawny man who had worked a long time in France, was called the Frenchman … Farther on from his unplastered house, which stood right in the middle of some lettuce and bean patches, a new, white, four-story building loomed up on the top of a hill that the road skirted. There was just one tenant living in it, a Mrs. Gmeiner with a sickly son about my age. He never came out to the forest … But from a house by the road, where they lived with their parents in the cellar, two tall, lanky, long-haired brothers named Žikič would often come out.

G
AMES OF EVERY POSSIBLE KIND
took place in the woods below the construction site … soccer, shoot the goat, slingshot tournaments … It never got boring. One day I went with the Balohs, who had brought along some rope, down to the Sava for firewood. One Slabe and one Jaklič brother also came along. I had no idea which, the younger or the older ones, because I didn’t know any of the four very well and they all looked a lot alike. Enrico didn’t come with. He avoided groups that went anywhere with some definite goal in mind. And he had enough firewood at home. Whenever his father came home from one of his construction jobs, he would bring along on a tricycle or a pickup truck a few gunny sacks full of wood. Bits and sawed-off ends of struts and masonry scaffolds from construction sites. Such nice yellow chunks that it made your mouth water to think what all you could do with them if you just had a hammer and nails at hand … Past the four-story house on the hill we came to the first feed
barns, hayracks, and farmsteads … These weren’t really proper farmsteads … they were half town, half peasant houses. The people who lived in them had half and half faces to match … If those were peasants, then I was a native Parisian. There weren’t even any dung heaps in front of the houses … Some fields, a horse here and there, but mostly just a few pigs and hens. And what about their fields?… Small plots of potatoes and beds of lettuce and onions and cabbage and beans. Now and then one Baloh or another would pounce on a patch and come out with an onion in his teeth … Oh, they wouldn’t have gotten away with that in Cegelnica … Everywhere there was lots of laundry out drying, in front of every house and in all the courtyards and meadows … Under the eaves stood the same tall, yellowish brown, two-wheeled carts that I’d seen on the day we arrived, on the main street outside the train station. This is where the laundry women live, Štef explained, who do the laundry for the rich folk in town … When we went down to a meadow that was full of trees and bushes, that smell, noise and breath that always encircled me grew stronger and stronger … And when we got to the edge of the meadow, I saw paradise … the Sava, bluer than the sky and flowing through three big, distinct channels with banks made of smooth, snow-white pebbles that otherwise only existed in dreams!… I almost keeled over in amazement. This was too much! I sat, unable to move ahead. The river was racing at tremendous speed! So this was the source of all that had seemed so mysterious in the atmosphere … Such air! Such unbounded shimmering! And the scent! Of gravel, of wet sand, of the wood, the branches, the willows, the stones that the water flowed through … 
Two hills … that stood in a field of blue on the far side … two furry tents, a dromedary … also belonged to this paradise … On the left a short forest, on the right mature willows … Too much for one pair of eyes … Such beauty was almost impossible, such a thing must surely intoxicate people, change them completely … turn them upside down and set them on their heads!… But I had to get up. My group was creeping ahead over the gravel without looking at anything around them, as though only the cord and their gunny sacks were important. We waded across the first channel, which was stagnant, then we stepped into the second … Its rapids … I could clearly make out the bottom, which was paved in brilliant light and dark stones of various sizes that would just lift up and float away if you kicked them. Such detailed inlay!… I could barely keep my balance on them … I thought that the water was going to fling me up toward the sky … suck me down … slice off a foot and carry it off … it raced with such force, as though I’d been caught in a powerful eel basket … I triggered a whole avalanche of stones that quickly floated away like a school of fish … The surface smelled like nothing else in the world. Like an incredibly huge bowl of ice-cold stewed fruit … Willows, rusted pots, sand in dried-out tree trunks … with their short roots and branches they were like bathyscaphes or naval mines washed up from the bottom … and dandelions, dandelions and more dandelions, as yellow as lemons … And on top of a heap of stones lay a long, yellow, narrow skull with hollow eye sockets that the wind blew through … “A horse!” said Štef … Like in the wild west! “Es ist zo nice here!” I forced out, but immediately realized I’d blown it. Red-haired Jaklič next to me
broke into a broad grin that involved all of his freckles and all of his teeth. Rats! I softened. For a second I turned my head toward the dense forest to calm down … Just let him poke at me one more time, and I’ll let him have it, I’ll give him a knock-out punch straight into the Sava … Štef and his crew, his younger brother and Marija, were already heading across the third, deepest channel to the other side … That was where the best firewood was supposed to be, that got washed up by the Sava and that nobody ever gathered … The wind was blowing over the water for all it was worth. At first the water was up to my knees, then suddenly up to my navel, my chest … It hurled into my shoulders, my hips, my knees, shoving me to the right, where the currents of both channels, this and the weaker one, joined up together and formed an enormous whirlpool beneath a high, eroded bank, a downright demolished earthen wall … As though a merry-go-round had been flung out into the rapids … Štef reached an arm out of the raging water … mother would have died if she’d seen me … and grabbed me by the belt around my trousers … Now I was in water up to my chin. My heart was beating not just in my throat, but in my chin. I was going to drown! I didn’t know how to swim. But I was ashamed … One of the Jakličes was skipping down the left side with his hands clasped over his head, like some girl dancing … Then there was Marija with a scarf on her head. And she was a year younger than me. Then she shouted … The water had carried her scarf away … She was screaming … The white rag was already floating away past the eroded bank … It vanished and reappeared … It could no longer be saved … The bank rose up like a wall … I climbed up on all fours,
clutching onto the wet sand … There was as much wood here as anyone could want … just waiting to be collected. Washed up into a heap, scattered to all sides, tired of waiting, even dust had begun collecting. Branches like you couldn’t find in the forest anymore … Boards from old fruit crates … Boards from old fences, still painted … Real traces from a wagon rig!… Nice looking yellow floorboards, as though they’d just been planed down … We hauled everything up into a heap, made bundles out of it, and Štef even made a kind of raft out of the traces. He was going to sell them to some peasants in Tomačevo, he decided. Marija was shivering in the cold. She had lost all her color and her nose and her ears were dripping. She knew what awaited her at home on account of the scarf. Her father’s belt, her mother’s anger. Štef paid her no heed. That was his sister’s problem … Each of us hoisted a bundle up onto his head. I was going to drown, I knew it, just as soon as I stepped back into the current … if I carried this thing on my head, I would lose my footing … I went as far as the water and froze. I couldn’t make myself move. They were already out in the middle of the water, with only their heads and bundles sticking out, closer to the far shore than to this one … “Do we need to carry you piggy back?” Štef shouted over his raft … I knew where that would lead. I shook my head. I wanted to show I was worthy, despite not knowing the language … I stepped into the water … step by step I veered to the right, as far to the right as possible, so that I would come out on the other side as far as possible from the place where the two currents met … The water was raging … A shower of stones amid flakes of froth threatened to crush all my bones. My head shook,
swayed, rocked … Every second could be my last … Without my hands to row and with the bundle on my head I was like an invalid. Should I throw it away? No! It perched on my head with an easy weight, even though the wind kept slamming into it, if I threw it aside and forded through with my hands and feet, I would remain intact. No, I had to carry that wood across to dry land … yes, I had to see it under the stove, at home, whatever the cost, it was my plunder … The water was reaching up to my chin. The wind carried off a few crate planks, so long!… But then my head rocked, shook, and suddenly slammed into the gravel on the bottom. Then I was upright again, minus the wood. And then a terrible avalanche of sand accosted me … sifted me … I’m going to drown … Disgusting! The flood is going to carry me off. I saw Marija, Jaklič and Stabe all running soaked over the gravel … and shouting. All their effort was in vain. The raging water flung me to the bottom once more, then carried me back up to the top … in a flash I could see them all on the bank talking about how I had drowned … With me floating past in pieces … For an instant I wasn’t aware of anything, and then something hit me hard in the chest and began squeezing me around the neck. It was one of the horse shafts, which Štef was holding on the other side … They dragged me up onto the hot sand, among the dandelions, willows, and nettles … Every part of me hurt, but most of all my belly and toes stung from the stones. “The Sava isn’t for you yet,” Štef said … Fine! At least I had gotten a thorough bath … Štef waded out into the middle of the second current. He scooped water up in his hands and drank it. “To trink?” I asked Marija, startled … “It flows over seven stones,” she
replied … What? Over seven stones? What kind of stones? Big ones? Where? Up at its source … I had never before drunk water that I swam in.