Newcomers (22 page)

O
N
F
RIDAYS
Mirko’s mother from the wagon in the gravel pit would put on her worst rags and set out from home carrying a handbasket to go begging. The boy had to go with her, no matter how much he resisted … Friday was beggars’ day and when they came home at noon, they brought all kinds of things with them … once in a while, even toys, whistles, mirrors, broken harmonicas … Once they gave me an arrow with a rubber tip … Mirko tried to get me to go with them and even his mother tried to persuade me, claiming that Mirko got bored without company … One Friday we set out together. And then several times after that … His mother didn’t paint her lips like she did at home. She put on a worn-out skirt that you could see all of Jarše through, and a blouse she had darned, she tied a blue apron around her waist and covered her head with a black kerchief down to the eyes so that she looked like a penitent … We went barefoot in single file. His mother’s hips swayed just over the cornflowers and poppies as we crossed a field … with each gust of wind her big rear end bulged in her skirt like an enormous onion … What might await us in town I had no way of imagining … Now, with nothing in hand, to get something, anything at all? But you could squeeze something out of a number of stores … even some that sold toys … if nothing else, a paper cap with advertising on it, sometimes a balloon or at least a catalog with color pictures … The selection was wide and the city well-supplied with surprises. We weren’t allowed to ring our bells outside the buildings that had blue metal signs over the door that said the owner contributed to the foundation for the poor of the municipality of Ljubljana. But we could outside stores and workshops … On
the sidewalk approaching the Dragon Bridge, where we were ringing our bells, a woman looked at us through a half-opened door … her eyes, when she noticed us, suggested that we were worse than the trash cans on the sidewalk. “Don’t you even know how to read?” she asked acidly. And indeed, under the house number there was a blue metal sign. How had Mirko’s mother missed that? The woman slammed her door shut and for a moment I lost faith in Mirko’s mother’s expertise. “I just thought we’d give it a shot,” she shrugged, laughing … The Šarabon department store across from the hospital was the most tolerant of beggars … you just had to hurry so that the other cadgers didn’t beat you to it … the tavern drunks, the morons and idiots from the municipal poor houses, who knew the city’s more charitable hearts well. You had to be there the minute the shutters over their doors got rolled up … The big store was the shape of the letter L. We went in and said what Mirko’s mother had taught us to say, “In God’s name, please give a beggar some alms …” I was supposed to go to the checkout window, she went to the grocery counter and Mirko went around the corner where some interesting housewares were sold … Those were the orders his mother had given us. That way one of us might get something, she said, or maybe two, possibly even all three, but there was no way, if there were three of us, that none of us would get anything … I stood in front of the tall pane of the cashier’s window and it took me a while to twist my lips into a kind of snail. “In kots nehm bleez …” “Huh? What did you say?” the cashier asked, who had a dreary face framed in a permanent, like schoolteachers. Either I’d said nothing or she hadn’t understood me. How on earth
was I supposed to get anything off of these well-stocked shelves, display windows and drawers up to the ceiling … with nothing at all, just for some words … after all, this wasn’t Childermas, where kids got to cane presents out of adults … Easier than talking would be just to snatch a candy or a packet of vanilla powder … I stepped back a pace from the glassed cabin when the cashier called me. “Are you with them?” she asked. “Yeees,” I nodded. “Here, you can have this …” I couldn’t believe it. The kind woman pushed a 25-para coin out through the gap onto the rubber mat on my side of the window … Outside Mirko’s mother got angry with me. I didn’t say a word. “You have to say nicely: in God’s name please give a beggar some alms. Then you bow your head and wait …” She put the money in her apron … and everything else … a small tube of toothpaste, some shoe polish, a lollipop, and a little metal frog in the hand-basket … At a bakery Mirko and I had to stand next to her, as though we were both her sons. The baker looked at all three of us and grabbed some pieces of yesterday’s bread lying in the corner of an empty shelf, and mother tucked them into her bag. “May God reward you,” she said … At the dry goods store it was all about money, because they wouldn’t give you enough material for a handkerchief, or at most a couple of buttons … at the delicatessen, amid the mountains of ham and cheese you might get a salami … and a broken pretzel, a box of matches or a thimbleful of brandy for her at a restaurant … Out on St. Peter’s Road we ran into others who were coming to beg … revolting little women all carrying empty, bag-like baskets … a tall, skinny man with a violin case … he at least played the fiddle for alms … Mother pushed us to get
moving … she had a few kind souls on this street … a barber, a watchmaker, a dairy attendant. She couldn’t afford to have the others beating her there … We sprinted and went under the noses of some old women through the open door of the barbershop, in among the glinting mirrors and barbers dressed all in white. Now it got easier, because she told us to just say hello nicely when we went in and then stay close to her without saying a word … At Mayer and Sons, where they had gigantic carpets lying on the floor, the sly-faced salesmen, all of them dressed in nice, gray suits, chased us out the door, waving their hands … At Krišper’s they had nothing but toys in the basement … train sets, dolls, musical tops, racing cars, tanks, boxes of tin soldiers. Mirko and I looked over them while she was upstairs in Housewares … Each of us got a small notebook with a red cover from the lady who sold picture postcards … “It’ll be ten soon,” mother said. At ten all begging had to stop. Not until late afternoon, from five o’clock until the Ave Maria could beggars come out and beg again. We still had the market ahead of us, you could always get something there, if not from the vendors, then out of the baskets and crates of refuse … Mother took off her black headscarf when we reached the Kolin factory on the way home … The play was over, no more mardi gras … The walk home to the gravel pit was hurried and impatient … Mother unfastened the padlock on the wagon and shook everything we had got out of the basket onto her bunk, which was at the far end of the wagon. Between it and the other end, where there were pickaxes, shovels, and clothes, there was a shelf of pots, a kettle with a lid, a quite decent stove and Mirko’s bunk … I didn’t get much,
most of it stayed with them, and almost no money … but that wasn’t so important. More important than the tiny stacks of change and the colorful junk on the bedcover was the fact that the woman then sat down cross-legged on the bed, so that I could see up her white thighs … Or when some item escaped from the little piles and rolled into a crack or a wrinkle in a sheet and then, as she went looking for it crouched with her knees on the bed, her breasts hung down like a beaver’s, their tips touching a pillow … I felt feverish at the thought of being able to see and do even more … all I had to do was take hold of her skirt and I’d have her over my head, just touch her blouse and kerplump! her breasts would fall out … just tug on her a bit and she would shake like a pear tree … I left the wagon all dizzy, envying Mirko for the fact that he could be alone with her. I couldn’t believe that she was his mother and he was really her son …

W
E MUDDLED THROUGH
the first half of August, that most beautiful month of the year, as best we could … I read to Gisela from the big little volume of
Die schönen illustrierten Abenteuer
(Wien 1933) that the old lady who lived over the cleaner’s had given me … It was really an exceptional artifact … the little one was intrigued by the princes and especially the princesses riding around in their coaches, attending dances at the royal court … Each story was richly illustrated … with everything, down to the last detail, before our eyes. I especially admired the drawings, then the colors … scarlet, green, pomegranate
red, a knight’s armor with rubies … It was masterful work! The best picture of all was one in the middle of the volume … a mighty battle stretching its whole height and width. Two-humped camels, elephants, Knights Templar, heathens in desperate flight … Gisela picked some daisies and grass and strewed them all over the book.

Then beginning in the middle of August it started to rain for all it was worth and we couldn’t go anywhere … A number of things happened during those rainy days.

First, one afternoon a soaking wet gentleman from the St. Vincent’s conference knocked on our door … When we opened it, there he stood, tall, with a dark mustache, wearing a hat and a camel hair coat … so elegant we didn’t know what to do with him. He filled the whole room … taking all its light and air for himself … We grew afraid … was he the police, had he come for us? He held an over-stuffed briefcase and had a board wrapped up in brown paper under his arm … He set something down on the table and something else on the bed … “My name is Vladimir Kompare and I’m from the St. Vincent’s conference,” he said. “Your family has returned from living abroad?” I nodded, whatever he said. “In the name of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul I’ve brought you some beans and a devotional icon,” he said. His mouth made such strange shapes, like a boxer’s after a knockout – mostly twisted, causing his brushed mustache to shake.… But he had the same sort of bent nose as the Arab merchants or the barbarians at the bazaar in my book … He wiped the sweat and raindrops off his face … he must have had to walk very fast from the streetcar stop near Holy Cross … No, he hadn’t had to walk that far,
on the road outside, next to the fence, was an old, rectangular car with a canvas roof … Targa-Florio 100 HP … So he was this wet from that short walk to the house … His briefcase was full of pieces of paper and newspaper clippings … he set a cloth bag down on the table … and an old, gray paper bag. He unwrapped the picture and threw the paper under the stove. “Where shall we hang it?” he asked. We didn’t have a single nail in the wall. “It will look nicest here over the bed,” he said. I looked for a tack for stretching skins and Vati’s pliers. He picked up the paper that he’d thrown under the stove and spread it over the bed. Then he climbed up … He had wide shoes, which were in style and looked like submarines … and he began to hammer the tack in. It didn’t take the first time, second time, not until the third … Then I handed him the picture, which had been printed on cardboard and put in a wide, shallow, brown frame with rounded corners. It was the first time I’d held a holy icon … on the back it was all scribbled with receipts, stamps and signatures … The man got back down and looked to see if it was hanging nicely … God knows I didn’t see him as a real person. His fancy hat and camel hair coat were completely mismatched with his distorted, fleshy afterthought of a face … If this wasn’t a disguise, then he was just strange. He took a document out of his stuffed briefcase. “Sign here. One kilogram of beans and one reproduction of the Mother of God.” Mother signed in Gothic script. Then he went to the Balohs to deliver the bag of flour. At that very moment they were kneeling around their stove, praying their rosaries … I went outside … through the small celluloid back window of his car I could see a whole stack of old cardboard pictures in wooden frames … “Ein
komischer Kauz!”
^*
Clairi said … “Die machen so eine blöde Reklame für das Kirchenamt,”
^†
mother said. The beans were the main thing. But they were so old, gnarly, and tough that even after cooking them several times and gnawing and grinding at them like peach pits, they wouldn’t soften and we had to throw them away …

Second: suddenly, because we hadn’t paid him the rent for three months, Mr. Perme threw us out on the street. Clairi went up to talk to him, but halfway there she turned back. “Er ruft mich … ich müßte zu ihm hinauf kommen … ich weiß, was das bedeutet, ich gehe nicht,”
^‡
she told me, her face flushed red. I understood what the old man wanted from her … On the day when we were supposed to clear out of the room by evening, Clairi and I put some things in bundles and headed over to the sugar mill to ask if we could spend a few days under their roof. “So, jetzt sind wir ans Ende gelangen … nur die Armenanstalt bleibt uns übrig,”
^§
Clairi whined the whole way there, making me cringe … First we had to go to city hall to get a document called a “poverty certificate.” I didn’t want to go upstairs with her and have to listen to her laments all over again … I stayed downstairs in the main courtyard entrance, among the cannon and mortars from World War I … The big, old Sugar Mill building was near the boat locks … it had at least a thousand dark windows … Its wide wooden stairs … where we met all different kinds of people carrying
washbasins, cooking pots, baskets full of tomatoes and lettuce on their heads … were so worn down that they frayed under each additional footstep as if it were a pistol shot. First, at a window in the entryway, they registered us, then we proceeded to a big office where rows of little female officials worked – gray-haired ladies who handed us a ticket for three beds … The dormitory upstairs was a long, vaulted room with twenty iron cots, all of them nicely made up with bedding. I rather liked it … It reminded me of a hospital or the sanatorium in Urach … We set our bundles and hand baskets down on the first three reserved beds by the door, and then we went back to Jarše … That evening at six, when the deadline arrived that Mr. Perme had given us for clearing out of the room, we handed the key to Enrico’s mother to take upstairs, and we left … We went as though we weren’t going. Even though we were. It was like a tasteless joke … Suddenly it occurred to me that we had become unrecognizable, barely a memory, and that from now on we had nothing to be afraid of … and that nobody would find us ever again, not even Vati … I pulled my hood made out of a bag way down over my eyes to my chin … this is how death walked around in its monk’s habit at the time of the plague and in my vivid green picture … Mother and Clairi took turns carrying Gisela and one other bundle. At the St. Peter’s Bridge a raincloud suddenly burst which almost broke their umbrella and whisked it away … we were all soaked through in an instant, with fountains and rivulets gushing all around us … We weathered it out in a little park right under the the nose of the sugar mill … the boat lock was on the verge of exploding in the onrush of water … We went up the wide
vaulted staircase. I knew which door … opened it: the dormitory was full of people … a regular circus ring … Some fat woman in a slip was brushing out her braids … three or four men, either idiots or beggars, were sitting on chests at the back in their long underwear … there were a lot of fruit vendors or Gypsy women along the wall … with green and red eyes … who were bathing a child in a wash basin as the water sloshed out. A strange world … never before seen … some sort of crazy picture … “Nein, da gehe ich nicht hinein!” mother said. “Und wenn ich auf der Stelle sterben müsse.”
^‖
She was as white as a sheet and shaking. “Nimm die Sachen! Wir gehen zurück!”
^a
I was sleepy and my soaked clothing stuck to my skin … but worst of all were my shoes, which were full of water and threatening to float off of my feet … “Warum nicht?”
^b
Clairi stared at mother as though she were seeing her for the first time. “Nimm das Zeug, Bubi!…”
^c
I picked up the two bundles and baskets that Clairi and I had set there and closed the door … I had no idea what to do next. We stood on the staircase landing for a few moments like statues … As alien to ourselves as strangers … The rain was pouring and streaming out of all of the big building’s gutters. We waited behind the half-opened doors of the wide entryway for the storm to dump all its rain and supersaturate everything … Gisela slept on the bundles, which we set in a cart fastened to the wall with a chain so fat it could have been used for a
drawbridge. Mother sat the whole time without saying anything … “Gehen wir”
^d
she said. Clairi wailed, “Wie …”
^e
“Ich habe die Fenster im Zimmer offen gelassen,”
^f
mother said. It was a long way and we had to endure more on the way back than when we came down … We waited the weather out under a railway overpass with sooty bundles billowing through it … It wasn’t so much raining anymore as misting, but we were still soaked from before, we were shivering, and we were muddied up to the waist when we got to the vicinity of Jarše … It was as though we had suddenly returned to our former bodies, that we’d come back to life; but we were afraid. On St. Martin’s Road we stood in front of a deep, water-filled depression before we headed down the old path through the wheat fields … It was eleven thirty … We carefully pushed the iron gate open so it wouldn’t squeak in its hinges … we walked down the sand path on tip-toe … the windows really were open a crack … We pushed them open and one by one we stepped from the window ledge onto the sewing machine and from it down onto the floor … “Wir werden da hinter dem Bett schlafen,”
^g
mother whispered. We stretched a rope from the stovepipe to a nail over the bed and hung a sheet over it so that the owner wouldn’t catch us first thing in the morning, we pulled the mattress off of the bed and made it up behind the sheet, from corner to corner … Quietly, very quietly, so that the Balohs, who liked to snoop
around, wouldn’t hear us … against the wall by the stove, on the other side of which Enrico and his mother had their room, we could breathe and talk a bit more normally, because the two of them would never give us away … “Ich muß hinauf,” Clairi whined with resolve. “Wir können uns doch nicht so einschleichen und wohnen, wo wir doch nicht gezahlt haben.”
^h
Mother said nothing. “Schlaft jetzt,”
ⁱ
she ordered. All four of us retreated behind the sheet, which let through the feeble light from the window like the screen in some cheap movie theater … I woke up late that next morning, the sun was already out … actually, Clairi woke me with a cup of warm milk in one hand and a fresh breakfast roll in the other. The sheet was gone from the rope. Was everything that had happened last night just a dream? I couldn’t believe that … “Wie denn das?…”
^j
I asked. Clairi blushed deeply, then went pale, her lips quivering and her eyes misting over … She threw herself straight at me, past Gisela, who was still asleep … She hugged me so hard that I felt jabbed in the ribs … Her hug almost smothered me, and she smooshed me with kisses … I was suffocating … pushed her away … objected … shrank back. I didn’t want to shout, or old Mr. Perme would hear … I wriggled loose, but she latched onto me again … and everything started all over again … A regular avalanche of affection … I nearly broke my back under all her crazy kisses and hugs … My face turned into mush … I couldn’t find my nostrils … “Bubi! Bubi!” As though she were begging me … 
She began crying somewhere inside, from very deep down … She was completely beside herself … The old man upstairs was going to leap out of bed … Finally she calmed down a bit. “Iß nur!” she said. She must have done something. But what? Had she sold Vati’s opossum skin on the sly? Had she gone upstairs to Mr. Perme’s, to that room with the compasses? What had happened? Where was mother?… I wolfed down the milk and roll … and got more of each, in the same portions, while Clairi kept looking at me very nervously. Then I got yet a third breakfast, which left me lying knocked out …