Newcomers (21 page)

Once after school I got to go visit Elite … It was a big sewing workshop, full of machines and men in vests cutting, measuring and sewing around a big extensible tailoring table … Vati worked around the corner, with the work in his lap, because he didn’t have a place at the table. Clairi sewed in the back behind some thick, brown tarp. She had to hide, I don’t remember from whom … the boss, the owner or the police … because she was working illegally … I didn’t understand … All I knew was that the men in vests at the big table were paying her directly out of their own pockets, because she was helping them. I went with both of them to Tivoli and then once with Clairi to visit her friend Marica, who worked in an ice cream parlor on St. Peter’s Road … This was a big establishment that had to be electrically lit even in daytime. Marica was pretty, blonde, and dressed all in white like a hairdresser … Not only did she have blue eyes and black eyelashes, but even her eyelids were blond, like a forest maiden’s … She brought each of us a piece of cake at her expense and then chatted with us as though we had paid her … The way home was much longer … and if I didn’t stop by the shed with the soldiers, all the more
so. Mother cooked beans and potatoes or macaroni, if she had any, and mixed in an egg every once in a while. But our biggest holiday was on Saturdays, when they both got their pay from the tailors … I went out as far as the light at the intersection to meet them and when I saw the loaf of bread and the package of butter in Clairi’s shopping net, I immediately broke off a whole heel, even though my sister tried to prevent it.

By the end of the school year I hadn’t passed. Teacher Roza assembled all of us for our final lesson. It was quite ceremonial. In a vase there were red and white roses with a tricolor ribbon wrapped around them. The boys were on pins and needles, red in the face and all of them sweating. Each of them had brought some present for the teacher … downright elegant little packages with a ribbon, or at least a bouquet of flowers. Miss Roza called out each name separately … You’re going to have to repeat third grade, she said to me when she handed me the big, rigid report card … all ones and twos, barely any threes … I was a little disappointed. This big document … with the stamp of the government and the white royal seal was going to trigger a tragedy, if I thought about my parents … After distributing the report cards Miss Roza gave us a short speech. All year long I’ve been looking at one of the boys in this class, she said, and thinking for the longest time that he had a terrible blemish under his forehead. Then one fine day I realized that he has such big, dark eyes … “Who? Who?” everyone shouted right and left. Our Lojze, the teacher said … So that meant I was handsome?! I realized to my delight … It was hot as I walked home and I was hungry enough to eat even wild chestnuts,
if there had been any, even though they’re as bitter as soap … I went straight to visit the soldiers out in the field, guarding their crops from their shack … They were true giants with upturned mustaches, big shoes and caps that made them look like they were wearing pots on their shaven heads … But they were so friendly, you would have thought we were the same age. They knew as little Slovene as I did and that’s why we got along. I sat in their dark shack, with them reclining on their metal cots, which were for the cavalry. Now and then they would offer me a piece of toast left over from breakfast, because they were hungry every day, too … they showed me their rifles … such clumsy ones that they would go off when they took them down off the wall, or wouldn’t when they tried to shoot them. They looked at my catechism with its color pictures of the creation of the world, the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve … everything that happened up to the birth of Jesus … and then the pious widows who accepted the infant John the Baptist in the New Testament … I said that I would sell them the catechism, which belonged to the school, for a fourth of a loaf of bread or, in other words, a day’s ration of army sourdough … I sensed I was doing wrong, but I had to gather some strength … At the far end of the field was a barrel of water that they called their rain gauge. I hesitated a bit. “One must pay the utmost attention to documents, all one’s life,” mother had always stressed. She was thinking of passports, birth and christening certificates, various receipts, papers, and confirmations. I folded up the stiff report card and submerged it in the water barrel, then I tore off a white wad of it and shoved it into a molehill … At home nobody asked me about my report card. Mother
didn’t remember about it until halfway through summer. “Hast du die Klasse bestanden?”
^*
“Ja,” I said, “das Zeugnis bekomme ich im Herbst.”
^†
Well, at least I would have some peace until then …

M
R
. P
ERME
had his model cruisers and destroyers out in the pond on maneuvers … That afternoon Hitler gave a speech. I heard his angry, piercing, percussive voice … the cheers … the fanfares … applause, as though all the hands were articulating bits of slogans in some big, probably beautiful assembly hall far away in Germany, all of it sensitively broadcast by that little box. The radio sat on the ledge of the landlord’s window and he and a few other refined gentlemen sat in the garden listening to it. When there was another round of applause and cheers, and you could hear them all getting up off their chairs (there had been 30,000 people assembled, according to reports the next day), one of the gentlemen in the garden said, “Here comes the ultimatum, the declaration of war. Now it’s France’s turn, or Poland’s …” War … tanks the color of leaves and dirt, airplanes, demolished houses, people tied up, like in the photos from Spain … meant the end of a beautiful life. It affected me even more when I considered that I had flunked the third grade … Of all the furious shouting I only understood a word here and there, even though the radio volume was turned all the way up, resounding as far as the
woods on the far side of the lime pit … The voice contained that unusual boldness, when you needed to take just one more courageous step … the step that left you speechless in Tarzan movies or Popeye cartoons … fantastic, impossible, unpredictable … that lured you to that place where others could only shout terrified, “Stop!” “Dieser Feigling wird alle Leute in die Grausamkeit stürzen,”
^*
mother said.

Clairi was spending days at home again, because it was summer and the tailors at the tables didn’t have enough work even for themselves. The Elite also furloughed Vati until the fall … He took everything he had out of his wicker basket … sleeves, collars, fur caps, short women’s vests, everything except for a big opossum hide, which he was keeping for really hard times … He put these items in a small suitcase and began walking around town trying to sell them … but he sold nothing. Someone gave him the address of the conference of St. Vincent de Paul, a philanthropic organization of the Church of the Sacred Heart, where we went to ask for groceries … The mother superior, who answered the door of the white building, sent us around the corner to the monastery’s public entrance where the sisters had their garden and kitchen. The entrance was next to a gasworks. The nun minding the entrance was tiny, old and nice. We were allowed to collect the uneaten bread that the St. Vincent’s nuns had left over from supper, emptying them out of the baskets on the long cellar tables into a paper bag. Mother would mix groats in with those crusts, producing an excellent dish. But we used up the five-kilo bag
within two or three days … Hunger returned to our house … dropping its sticky, invisible net on us again. I was so hungry I couldn’t stand upright anymore … I went to lie down in the cool grass under the trees at the back of the garden. My head was spinning … I saw ghosts … and it seemed like the world came and looked at me: the trees assumed barky masks … the sharp grass … little white tears on the blades that kept dropping off … and the awning attached to the angled timbers over the door … I started shaking, so I went to lie in the sun, but then I got hot, so I retreated back into the shade … I was like a freezer or a blast furnace or a barometer … there was no way I could get rid of the painful oozing of saliva in my mouth, or the putrid stench belching up out of my guts and cramped stomach … The others, mother and Vati, lay in our tiny room so they wouldn’t move around too much and thus make themselves even hungrier … I went to check in on them twice … first out of amazement that they were lying together, and the second time in fear that they might have died. Their heads were leaned up against the headboard and their feet hung out over the end of the bed, and they were dozing or sleeping with their hands folded over their stomach … as though they were dead … I went out to the grass growing at the edge of the road to find ears of grain to chew on … tree bark and acorns in the woods were too bitter … The worst was that we didn’t have a single friend to help us … maybe if we had told somebody … Mrs. Gmeiner owed mother something, even though she had pawned the hides … She didn’t dare go to her house to ask for an extension, let alone another advance …

In the middle of July Vati’s lungs got worse … They wheezed so much that it was truly disgusting. He spat out blood everywhere, onto the dusty road or into small bits of paper. When he went to see a doctor, they made him stay in the hospital. He lay in a big room with lots of other patients. They were always pleasant and said hello whenever I went to visit him. Real skeletons. They lifted their heads and waved at me over their pull-up bars or at least bared their teeth. They were so meek … gray, not dangerous in the least or aggressive like healthy people were, I felt so good among them. If I ever became a doctor, then in addition to the respect I would enjoy in endless supply, I would also have a peaceful life … Vati would give me the bread left over from his supper, breakfast and lunch, which he hid from the sisters of mercy in the drawer of his night table. In return I collected butts for him, the ends of stogies and cigarettes … I always found the greatest density of them scattered near the Moste movie theater on St. Martin’s Road, next to the sidewalk, and outside buildings that housed taverns and restaurants. I folded little pouches out of newspaper to put in my pockets, to make my collecting more efficient and keep my trousers from stinking of butts. “Not a word to your mother about … (he didn’t want to actually say about what), Bubi!” Vati exhorted me. He looked at me uncertainly … doubting my word. But because we spoke Slovene to each other, our conspiracy remained under a double seal of silence, more confidential and hush-hush than the White Prince’s secret writing. Out in the hospital garden we unwrapped the tobacco remains from their papers and leaves and dried them out on the cement of a fire hydrant … it produced quite an exemplary heap of assorted
tobaccos … yellow, black, dark brown … as fine as grit or as coarse as crepe noodles … if by some miracle that heap could have changed into food, into rice or spaghetti … that would have been something!… Vati wore an old, oversized, patched pair of pajamas and a striped robe that belonged to the hospital. He looked a little eccentric, like a crazy person or a masquerader. Behind his baggy hospital clothes he was even skinnier, shaggier and more naked than Christ on the cross … The most he ever saved from a meal was three slices of bread, sometimes a breakfast roll hard as a rock … It was a long way home and I didn’t always succeed in practicing chivalrous restraint … now and then I arrived home with just two pieces of bread, or just one.

B
ALOH AND
I would go to the Sava for firewood … to old Jarše to steal heads of cabbage … out of a little field around the power line, where the peasants had to run too far uphill to be able to catch us … and to more remote destinations, like Štepanja Village or near the airport for potatoes … One time we nabbed a whole wooden bucket of lard out of an unlocked granary … and another we brought a half pound of plums home along with the basket … It was a time of legumes and vegetables, which could be prepared in a hundred different ways … But the lot of it lasted for barely more than a supper …

Clairi and I took all of the finished items and the better hides … except for the opossum skin … In order to be able to sell them, we wrapped each item up in its own attractive package made out of newspaper and we put all of them into a bundle, because the suitcase would
have been too small for such a selection. We left early in the morning, because Clairi was ashamed for anyone to see what we were living off of. She sent me into the courtyard first, so I could sneak out while everyone was still asleep, and I ran through the grain field to the road, where I waited for her. Each time she sent me a little farther out … until at last we agreed I would wait for her by the wall of the railway overpass next to the Dragon factory. I hoisted the bundle up and we set off on our rounds, basing our calls on the appearance of a given house, whether it looked well-to-do or at least had something distinguished about it … the front door, a doormat, a curtain. We also paid calls on furriers … But the furriers … the four or six of them on both sides of the Ljubljanica … didn’t have any work or income, themselves, aside from storing their clients’ furs for the summer. Clairi would ask, and I would translate, whether they had any work we could take home to do, no matter how basic or trivial, but because the summer season was at its height … I sweated streams under the weight of that stifling bundle … they had laid off all their workers and they didn’t anticipate “any increase in demand for furs on the part of clients during the autumn” … so naturally they didn’t buy anything from us. Mrs. Rot, a fat blonde lady, owner of the largest fur store in town next door to city hall, was impressed with our expertly finished items. With Clairi’s permission she cut open a collar lining, which she then gave to one of the girls working for her to sew back up in the workshop that was over the store, which had a mannequin in a fur coat in each of its five display windows. She examined Vati’s stitching on the skin and then the fur on the other side … he always used a collection of
various pieces, patches and remains of pelts to sew an entire fur hat, a muff, or a vest … in such a way that the fur of the various pieces of pelts was aligned with respect to color, composition, and density, making it look as though he had made each item out of the whole pelt of a single animal or just from the backs of a few larger animals … “Das ist wirklich ein großer Meister,”
^*
Mrs. Rot said. That made Clairi and me feel good, even if we didn’t sell her anything … if we could have left just one item with her to put in a display window for a week, alongside one of her black and silver crystal name plates, that would have meant even more to us. Then we could hope that somebody would buy it sooner or later, and of course Vati’s prestige would be recognized, too … The whole time Mrs. Rot examined our items, I examined her, too … especially the neckline of her silkily billowing smock … and what big, white, dreamlike high breasts she had, from her neck practically down to her waist … my little pole stood right up, as if ready to fly over the counter … The other furriers, all men, were like Vati … a little pale and wearing smocks that were full of needles and fur … Smudged with various leather dyes, they came out of their workshops past hanging foxes and bunches of little dormouse furs to get to their counters … But they had proper establishments … display tables, small tables and chairs for their customers, new magazines, a cash register, a little rubber dish for the change … everything that a real merchant needs … It would have been a great honor to us if they had taken anything to display in their windows or if they had
promised Clairi some work for the autumn … We left each stuffy little storefront more frustrated than the one before. Nothing. There was nothing. Where else could we go? We had written down on slips the addresses of all the furriers in town … We decided to go from door to door in the neighborhood of the courthouse, the one that had towers … Clairi walked a bit in front of or behind me, because she was ashamed … she asked me to carry the bundle when we walked down beautiful Miklošič Street, which led to the train station … several paces ahead or behind, just not even with her … We rang the doorbells on every floor and when a door opened … and they were all alike, inlaid with wood of a different color … Clairi would start saying in her Swiss German mixed with some French that we were selling various furs … chokers, muffs, hats, stoles, boleros … the whole kit and kaboodle … for winter, for dances, for everyday wear … for very little money, practically for free … For the ones who couldn’t understand the language I translated her offer in my moronic Slovene, which sounded like I was echoing out of a kettle or a pipe. We were met with all kinds of looks … startled, as though we’d just fallen out of the sky and they or we were just dreaming all of this … piercing, as though we’d escaped off some train … derisive, as though we were circus performers … Some of the more fortunate ones would just start to laugh and call the other homebodies out from the kitchen and bedrooms to come have a look at us. There were also the harsh, rejecting faces, as though we were burglars, and the looks that practically smoldered with hatred and sliced everything off … our hands, our ears, our noses … The hostility from the eyes of a bare-headed young man with a small mouth was like a wave
that billowed into us, forcing us a step back toward the banister … Clairi said indignantly that this wasn’t called for, we hadn’t done anything wrong … But we had to pick up our stuff and get out of there fast, because the loon or falcon or eagle was getting nervous and the piano that someone was plunking on in the apartment suddenly went silent … Some younger woman invited us into her apartment with a vaulted ceiling … it was a big, round room in a tower next to the Fig Tree restaurant, where through the windows you had a great view of the articulated streetcars as they writhed and slinked passed each other in the round intersection like snakes in their nest. The building’s facade was quite elegant, all green bricks and blue carnations … but inside it wasn’t so perfect. Old divans with grease-stained covers dangling down to the floor, yellowed books with no covers, stinking of glue … I set the bundle down on a carpet that had practically eaten into the floor and the woman inspected our things … We unwrapped each item from its newspaper, but the lady wasn’t satisfied. She kneeled down and her lemon yellow house robe opened, but she had nothing on beneath it. Embarrassed, Clairi smiled. “Schau nicht hin, du Dreckfink!”
^†
she said. But I wanted to see her furry hole and it was awful to see but not see it … Somehow it parted and something jutted out … The crazy lady didn’t want to buy anything, so we wrapped everything back up … she offered each of us a yellow candy out of a tin box … Clairi didn’t dare put it in her mouth. She went down the stairs so fast that I had to shout after her, “Clairi! Clairi!” I only caught
up with her in the lobby. “Wirf den Zucker weg!”
^‡
she ordered me. She flung her piece of candy into an ashcan. “Nun machs!”
^§
I felt bad about it, but I threw it out … and I felt even worse when I saw ashes stuck all over it, it probably had some liqueur filling. “O mein kleiner!”
^‖
Clairi pressed me to her chest … All the buildings in the street behind the courthouse were handsome. “Lauter Advokaten! Die haben Berge von Geld.”
^a
We went into a building that had a white marble statue of a mother and child over the entrance … Next to the doors there were whole rows of plaques … black, white, blue … announcing a lawyer’s office.… In a bright room there was a gray-haired doctor, a lawyer, sitting at a big desk … A gentle face, gray hair, the wide shoulders of a trained boxer. He spoke exquisite German, “hochdeutsch” … Clairi just stared at him … her nostrils quivering … This was the husband of her dreams! Gray-haired, not too old, attractive, intelligent, rich, courteous, educated … But when he got up from his huge desk and stepped away from his gold-studded leather chair back … I couldn’t believe my eyes … He was short, not just shorter than me … but a dwarf … even though he kept the broad shoulders … Now Clairi was more beside herself than ever … He crossed the gleaming parquet floor to where we stood, smiled at me as one man does at another … such teeth, like blue porcelain!… and clasped both of Clairi’s hands in his. “Kommen Sie einmal nächsten Donnerstag, am
Abend, neee?”
^b
he said in his perfect German … “Ja, gut,” Clairi said, quickly turning to leave. She could barely find the handle in the thickly upholstered door. Once we were back outside she regained her composure. “Hast du das gesehen, Bubi?… Solche Armmuskeln im Stuhl und dann … Was für ein Knirps! Aber doch: wie intelligent, reich, apart … Aber was meinte der Mistfink doch, als er mich eingeladen hat, ich soll am Donnerstag abends kommen?… O, das soll er sich gar aus dem Kopf schlagen. Fällt mir im Schlaf nicht ein … Aber es ist so etwas Feines an ihm, nicht wahr?”
^c
She was unsure … We headed towards Tivoli … the whole way there she kept talking to herself, shaking her head or nodding … On the third floor of a red building next to Tivoli a long, skinny, heavily freckled, nice woman answered the door … as thin as a reed. She said right off the bat that she wasn’t going to buy anything … but then she asked me where we were from and when I told her, she invited us into her bright kitchen for a bowl of cold stewed fruit … “Ich bin Lehrerin,”
^d
she said. It took my breath away. She had a light green book edged in black on the table titled “Slovene Grammar” … notebooks full of tables … and different colored pencils … It was too much for me … She asked Clairi and me
questions. Her German was quite good … “Vielleicht kommt Ihr Bruder einmal in meine Klasse.”
^e
That would be nice, but … “War das eine nette Frau,”
^f
Clairi enthused about the kindness of Mrs. Komar. “Bubi, est gibt wirklich viele ordentliche Menschen auf der Welt und es ist nur Schade, daß man sie nicht schneller aufspürt.”
^g
A little old man in a sweater and hat who was just then out in the flowers doing something with water let us into a house with a garden … He called Clairi into a separate room behind a glass door … Through the milky pane I could see she was modeling some of the items for him … I heard her quietly squeal then screech at the top of her voice and shout … she came flying out all flushed in the face. “So ein Schwein.”
^h
She was holding a choker in one hand and a bolero in the other … I quickly stuffed it all back into the bag and made a beeline behind her through the garden. I only managed to catch up with her at a railway crossing, because she’d sat down on a bench there … We wandered through several intersections, an underground pedestrian crossing, a glass corridor that had an excellent draft, some narrow streets, side streets, thoroughfares … and a peaceful neighborhood of villas on the far side of the Roman wall where the sidewalks were cooler under long rows of trees … My feet started to blister in the old pair of
street shoes that I’d had to put on at Clairi’s insistence so I would look more respectable … I cooled them off in some ditch … and all sweaty under the well spigot of a deserted garden restaurant … The fur scratched at my back … all those damned remains of times past were just too pathetic, disgusting, annoying … We didn’t rest, there wasn’t even enough time for me to pick up a chestnut or a stick … as though our customers were everywhere waiting impatiently for us at their windows … The trees started spinning around me … Was it worth it? Even if we did sell them … it was strange how grown-ups suddenly struck me as disgusting for getting so excited about buying all that furry crap and then actually wearing it … At last all that was left to us was the pawn shop on Poljane Road … from one side of a barred window you found out how much you would get and how long you had to buy your things back … All the men who worked there were as pale as death and wore black sleeves, I had been once before with Vati to this room with counters and windows, resembling a bank. He got a small sum of money, which we immediately exchanged in the bakery next door for some bread … but they gave you so little time: you had two weeks before you lost your collateral, and then you had nothing … Vati had brought several collars, fur hats and a whole child’s outfit made of white rabbit furs, for a girl … In one building, in its courtyard where there was a dry cleaner, we got lucky. Above the ironing shop was where a skinny little old lady lived, who was German. Clairi began her pitch from the top … mindlessly and a little unhinged by now … you had to wear the customer down under a hail of words … An incredible opportunity … satisfaction guaranteed … 
The customer was supposed to succumb to your talking points, lose their common sense. “Lassen Sie doch das, liebes Fräulein,”
ⁱ
the old lady suddenly boomed in a deep voice … She invited us inside to get cool “hinter den dicken Mauern meines Hauses …”
^j
Good lord, it was the old empire everywhere you looked … carved side tables, cabinets, tasseled curtains, a vivid fresco on the ceiling … angels with trumpets … around a gold fixture that a chandelier hung from. And something even more incredible: rifles with dates carved on their stocks inside a glass cabinet, swords on the walls, khanjars, shields like the one the White Prince carried … She gave us some cookies and ice cream … her daughter, who was the owner of the dry cleaning and ironing shop and a big linen store, had an actual machine for making ice cream … She smoked a cigarette in a long mouthpiece and bought a muff and a chain necklace from us … but probably more out of pity than need … She took the money for them out of a velvet purse that was attached to her waist … “Kommt mal wieder vorbei,”
^k
she said … She tucked a colorful volume of
Die schönen illustrierten Abentever
^l
into my pocket … That was the kind of grandmother that the White Prince himself would have had as his sidekick in a castle under siege … If Clairi and I could sell at least one little fur hat each week, our six-day quest around town would pay off …