Newcomers (35 page)

Now it was also high time for us to attack the Castle … War was in the air. We collected suitable stones for our slingshots, sharp arrowheads that we put in an empty road worker’s box that lay unused among the carts … We had target practice using bottles … The day before the attack I went to reconnoiter. Carefully, without a single stone in my pocket … first contact with the enemy should be like a first loving caress … On the hillside above the path that a street sign
called the Path Past the Fences I noticed a kind of trench, a meter-deep hole dug in the ground, covered with branches and surrounded with stakes strung with thorn bush branches … A guardpost, a sharpshooter’s nest, the enemy’s front line … The next day around lunchtime we headed uphill, as if we were going on a field trip … The bunker in the hillside looked like a bush from a distance. We crawled up to it on our bellies … as though the girl we were in love with had fallen asleep in a ditch. There was nobody in it … We yanked out the stakes and threw the branches aside … Well look here, they had some sort of piggy banks made out of bean cans, but there was nothing inside them, they were empty … Then it struck me: they had meant to string noisy tripwires of tin cans around their trench, like the English had done on Crete, so that any paratroopers approaching their fortress would set off a clatter … We continued uphill on the paved road toward Osoje. From here on the castle gang had their eyes everywhere, behind every bush, every tree … I said that we should all pretend like we were gathering bouquets of wildflowers … for science class, for our botany teacher … Then an inner tube that Franci, that klutz, was concealing slipped out from under his shirt and trousers … clunk!… right onto the middle of the wide road. That was the alarm signal! Even the gabbiest of gabby people could have noticed that with the unaided eye … We hadn’t yet reached the foot of the ramparts when I saw Sandi in his red shirt running down the tree-lined path out of the castle … Two or three others, including Škerjanc and a girl, were racing behind him … “Slingshots!” We had to hold them back. Plink! Plink! the poor little pebbles went flying. We only stopped them for a moment, during
which they looked around … then they headed downhill through a ditch, behind some trees and through the grass toward the path … By then Franci had already turned around … he was running down from Osoje and dropping everything along the way … the inner tube, his saber, the stones out of his pockets … Behind me I still had Ivan, Firant, Karel, Marko … Andrej a little farther to the rear … The castle gang were already lying in the grass, testing their slingshots … we had to get down on the ground and shoot our rocks from there, aim at the boards we suspected they were hiding behind … Then all of a sudden, as if out of nowhere, a watchman wearing a green cap came running out of the ramparts … waving a stick. “It is forbidden to walk on the grass!” Was he the father or an uncle of one of the castle gang? This broke all the rules! He was threatening just us with his cane, but not even looking at them … cop justice!… We had to withdraw from the grass onto the path, onto the gravel, while the castle gang could stay in the grass, he still wasn’t paying any attention to them, as though they weren’t there. The jerk! Just then Škerjanc’s brother leapt out of the grass at me … at least he had the same kind of nose and shaved head as Škerjanc … I grazed his shoulder with the inner tube … “Attack! Attack srough ze grass!” I shouted. When I looked back, Ivan wasn’t breathing down my neck anymore, he was running away … and a bit farther on I could make out Firant, Marko, Andrej, Karel. So he was a coward after all! The thought filled me with pleasure … and for a moment it was as though I was free again! So now I was all on my own. This was going to be a regular fight of a canary in its cage! I had to decide! I had to attack! I began to shout. Only hot air came
out of my mouth … I threw a whole thing of stones at Sandi and the others lying in the grass, of whom all I could make out was an ear or a forehead here and there … I had to take the offensive … My skin was taut with anger, taut to bursting, like a drum skin, so that any blows would only have made dull thuds and nothing else. I charged straight ahead through the grass, throwing stones … I changed into the victor, because now I wasn’t the one who had done wrong … They were in shock … that’s what I counted on … I darted past their shoulders, legs, and heads as quick as a breeze … Hop! and in a single leap I was on top of the ditch, right in the middle of their unconquerable boulevard where they staged their parades!… At least I’d done that! They got up, shouted … “Get him!…” I saw reinforcements running down the tree-lined path … a second group, the one that always guarded both points of access to the castle from the market, the shorter path and the longer one … they always thought of everything!… I had to get down via the path that went past the ramparts, that led through the woods to Karlovški Bridge … The stones began to crumble to dust. I saw the red shirt amongst the rabble. I dashed off toward a turn beneath the wooded slope. “Go around! Catch him at the chapel!…” If they caught me, they were going to take my pants off, this I knew. That was a lot worse than getting beaten up, it was psychological pain … not anger, but sadness would dull all physical torment … I didn’t have a single breath left in my lungs. I looked over my shoulder: sky and red shirt. Around the turn. Yet another turn. A double turn like a snake wound up in a coil. I flung myself over the edge of the road down the hillside. Thump! Smack! What sound does a head
make when it slams into a tree?! Down, down!… I rolled past trees, through ferns, bushes and undergrowth, all speckled and spongy, my arms and legs smacking against the trunks of trees … The wall along Streliška … there was no end in sight to it, I could barely make out a gap in it over the orphanage … Some gentleman dressed in a cloak and a velvet hat was standing in the middle of the road holding a flower … The soup kitchen was just about here … I was furious. That damned, cowardly gang! I may have been a hero … but I had also turned tail … All scratched up, I limped to the riverfront to confront them … Of course not a single one of them was anywhere to be found … they’d all hidden, each one for himself …

O
N
C
HRISTMAS
Eve Gisela and I got toys and clothes from the German organization in town. Gisela got a sweater that smelled strongly of perfume and some other girl, along with a black doll made of celluloid with a grass skirt and a ring through her nose … really quite nicely made. I got a racket and shuttlecock and a red checked jacket, the kind that bad guys usually wore in the westerns … I put it on right over my shirt and when I went out that evening to look at the toys on display in the tobacco shop’s window, a policeman stopped and scrutinized me from the side. He thought I was planning to rob the store …

The victories of the German army around the world had begun to surround me with friends. My schoolmates became more polite. Those victories and defeats of some army in the distant world were like bingo, where you’d win or lose friends … It annoyed me that they
surrounded me for things that smelled of far-off, noisy places that I’d never seen with my own eyes and where something was always exploding … I wanted to get rid of random friendships like that … I already knew how that went: warm today, cold tomorrow. It actually tickled me as I headed to school in the morning to see them crawl out of their houses so they could join me on the way up to Graben … As though I wore one of those uniforms with the ribbons … as though I were one of Rommel’s tank drivers or a Stuka pilot. “The English have got more tanks,” some kid named Bajec said to me. Now he was going to go on about the respective merits of German Tigers and British Churchills … Even Karel changed. All of a sudden he was at my heels more than ever, without my particularly asking him to go places with me … His mother invited me to their place for crepes with crushed walnuts. I sat at a round table at the back of their shop, which they closed over the noon hour, and ate with the whole family. Ivka smiled at me once. For the first time …

The Germans were already in Bulgaria, where the communists had once blown up a church … When Cvetković suddenly signed the Triple Pact in Berlin … That was news!… People crowded Town Square, jostling this way and that, they were completely shaken … Mlekuž paced the hallways at school … his smock fluttering, his cane furiously banging … he spoke with the teachers, resting his bare head on the doorframe, haggard and quiet, as though he were looking into a hospital ward, not a classroom. You could feel it: Germany was coming … on a hundred thousand motorized wheels … black and horrible … Then one morning General Simovič defied the government … and
seized power. They called it a putsch … Special one-page editions of the newspapers started coming out … The heir apparent Peter II had become King of Yugoslavia … He spoke on the radio. Suddenly, spontaneously, there were flags on every house and building … even way up on the peak of the Hammans’ roof, nobody knew who lived there … there were coats of arms in all the store windows, the heir apparent’s colors, his portrait … among all the eyeglass frames at the optician’s there was a big cut-out: the crown and scepter of the Karađorđević dynasty … the Oplenac church … When you turned away from a display window, the air was full of what everybody was exhaling. It swarmed with it … Defiance of that arrogant house painter with the little black mustache!… Music, young people, old people marched densely entwined across Town Square and shouted, “Bolje rat, nego pakt!” … “Bolje grob, nego rob!”
^*
 … From the post office to the Triple Bridge students carried litters on their sholders that were covered with white flowers, in the midst of which stood, like the Mother of God in Brezje, a big color portrait of King Peter II in a glass-covered golden frame … still others carried on another scarlet litter the symbols of the king’s honor. Some shop windows had been transformed into creches depicting the life of the royal family … Peter, Tomislav, Andrej playing in a sandbox at Bled … The streetcars were festooned with ribbons, the policemen all wore the tricolor on their sleeves, and flags waved in front of Aleksandar I on his big horse in the Star Park … there was an indescribable excitement and bustle in
all of the stores … the music pavilion of the Casino was all decked out in Yugoslav pennants … a vase of flowers was in every window, even the most ordinary and rundown … Great Britain and America were going to help us!… If people were this genuinely excited, they also had to be noble … And if it didn’t matter anymore whether you were young or old, but everyone was equally young and old, then that made them even better and happier … I marched with my school past the post office … of course, everyone was looking at me askance … it was best if I just went away. The young, exultant faces, the flags leaned up against the display windows, the newly forged friendship of teachers and students, the general rejoicing put me into a stupor, a strange, unbearable sense of being divided … How were things going to be with mother and Vati now? I raced home and from home back out into the streets … Vati was standing at a window, pale and entirely beside himself. In 1914 he had hidden just like this in the attic of their green house while the Swiss Germans trashed his store downstairs, because they assumed he was a Serb … He had never thought that anything like what happened that day would ever happen again. He had left the Austro-Hungarian Empire when he was still young, and when he came back, he returned to the same places, but a different country. He was excited, defeated, speechless. He began splaying his feet even more when he walked and incessantly blinking behind his glasses. Was he glad or worried? And which one was predominant in his mind? I looked at him instead of asking, since that was the only way I could tell. If I’d asked him what he thought about all of this, he would have answered these were not matters for children. Or that
everything that was happening was just froth, like on beer … Mother, of course, was afraid, and Clairi was shaking. “Der Hitler wird doch nicht aus Beleidigung die Stadt bombardieren?”
^†
Mrs. Hamman was nowhere to be found. The shutters were down on her storefront … I was for king and country, but everyone around me was practically trying to stab me with their eyes … I was for the war that was coming, I didn’t like Hitler, but I wasn’t against the Germans … I would have preferred to change into a road that parades marched down, or a horse, or a tree on a hill … whatever, as long as it wasn’t a person. The air shimmered with people, as though it were burning … it was strange that the housetops didn’t ignite, that the tiles didn’t begin to slide off the roofs and the asphalt to boil …

On Palm Sunday I went with Gisela and her basket of Easter eggs and oranges to get them blessed at the St. James church. I thought everything would be as it had always been. Girls dressed in white with blue sashes, as I told Gisela. Bundles of willow branches and wicker baskets of fruit that people bring to get blessed. Then, a week later, the thing I always enjoyed attending most of all … the miracle at daybreak: “Christ is risen …” But it wasn’t like that at all. Miki, the son of the drunken painter, was waiting for me outside the door to his apartment. We had arranged to meet before mass. But then the siren started to blast. All of a sudden, way up high, almost pasted to the sky, the little crosses of airplanes appeared … A first flock. A second. A third.… Miki and I recognized them from the pictures on chocolate
bar wrappers and from photos we’d seen … Heinkels, Junkers, Messerschmidts, famous airplanes … they roared steadily against the hazy sky … one squadron after the other … Their roar echoed inside the church like the buzz of the organ bellows … everybody looked up at the painted ceiling, from which the chandelier was swaying on its chain … at the windows that rattled, as though a worldwide deluge were pounding them. The sirens kept howling. Everyone stayed in the church … And at that precise moment the sky over Belgrade erupted … roaring and snapping everything from its place … people, trains, tanks, infants, Gypsies and grandmothers, then followed more airplanes, one squadron after the other. And all of these bundles of branches and baskets here, and us with them. It came as though clouds had just opened up, one after the other. Flames, bombs, new flocks and the extinguished volcanos of buildings coming to life again, crammed full of phosphorus … Boom! Boom! The suburbs left hanging from churches, train engines from bell towers …