Newcomers (36 page)

Civilians reappeared on the streets with flowers and wooden suitcases … Soldiers in helmets … Because the trolley wires and power lines were too low, they all held onto a long flag as though it were a fence … “For king and country!” Howtizers! Mortar rounds lay cushioned in hay in horse rigs and hay carts … Sergeant Mitič appeared for a moment. In a helmet, with a gas mask and cartridge belt. “Još par dana i alles kaputt …”
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What was he … a traitor, or not?… We could hear cannon spitting hollowly into the sky, as if the sun were exploding
behind the clouds: boomff! eeeee! boomff! eeeee!… There were no real classes at school. The newspapers came out on a single sheet, like flyers … “Germany marches on Greece and Yugoslavia!” …

We had several gray, cloudy days … One afternoon the air suddenly ripped apart … people began racing out of all the houses with hand wagons, carts, tricycles, horse rigs … they went to the garrisons and warehouses that the army had abandoned out on the edge of town … to grab flour, lard, zwieback, uniforms, blankets, pistols … Karel, Ivan, Marko, Franci, Andrej, everyone … Vati borrowed a handwagon from Mrs. Hamman … It was getting dark as we went past the sugar mill … the sky was displaying the magnificent glow of fires. Straw was burning by the bale … The long road was crammed full of wagons … There were only civilians now in the garrisons … men, women, children, old people … what a sight! As though rats had broken into a church. Bonfires raged that had been set with gunpowder … People were carrying boxes out of the warehouses down chutes and down the staircases inside the garrison buildings … they threw bags out of windows, which exploded on the ground, leaving the people below to walk through flour and macaroni. Was even one of them thinking about the army, about king and country? No, certainly not about them … the king and government had fled by airplane to Egypt, where it’s always warm and there are pyramids … I pushed my way through with the wagon and Vati … who was dreaming about us getting lots of army zwieback … past heaps of smashed crates with zwieback that had been trodden to dust … over puddles of oil, skating rinks of lard … The warehouse door had been ripped out and
lay like a pontoon bridge over a muddy lake … We hauled one, then another crate of zwieback over to the chute, sticking our heads out every window to make sure no one had stolen our wagon … We came close to not getting anything, because I kept deferring to older people out of courtesy … People were setting their children onto crates to reserve them … or dogs, jackets, scarves, umbrellas … We were lucky to come across an untouched metal container of lard that didn’t belong to anyone. Just the container alone was worth something, empty it could serve as a table … We trundled our booty home … along the way we saw some people repairing their damaged wagons, broken axles and shafts … All of our heads were smoldering hot … flour! lard! bread!… “Dino brought a whole bag of eggs home,” one woman said. “And just imagine, only one of them broke.” That was incredible … At home we quickly unloaded the cart and raced back to the garrison … Once again we loaded up zwieback that was so good, we found some more flour in an open bag and picked some muddy horse blankets up off the floor … A truck belonging to the merchant Šarabon drove through the gate pushing people aside like a plow … It was blazing a trail for itself … and the people shouted at it. “Jerks! Parasites! Gluttons!” I made way for it, because their cashier, that time when I went to their store with Mirko’s mother to beg, had given me a dinar … The truck stopped beneath the warehouse windows and some loaders immediately set about heaving bags onto it … What sort of a store was this!… as though you’d walked into the bowels of a dirigible with its gas chambers full … I noticed an army belt and a brand new bayonet in its metal sheath on the floor … That was a find!… I fastened it on
under my shirt. But there wasn’t a single rifle anywhere, much less a pistol, just a few bullets and gunpowder in disks that people would throw on the fire to make it burn brighter while they searched and collected … People, wagons, hitches, motorcycles and sidecars were like lunatic outlines against a glowing background … Some people in the crowd were exceptionally polite. Some took father by the shoulders and gave him a cordial shake. “If you need any rubber Palma heels, they’re back there by the locomotive,” one man said and pointed to where the train engine was going tssshhhh, tssshhh!… Vati thanked him. In fact all of this was like a big present from the govenrment to its people … I saw Andrej and his mother, who was all excited and humming something, or so it seemed, Firant with his father, both of them all fired up … We barely said hi to each other, there was no time … At home Vati and I set the crates of zwieback on the bottom of the built-in cabinet and we immediately put the lard into pots … I hid the bayonet under the wooden floor in the place that was meant for a bathtub …

The next morning a white flag fluttered from atop the castle tower … actually it hung, because there was no wind … Probably the people most offended by that flag were Sandi and his castle gang … It was the end of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. I knew it too little to be either happy or sad, I was just curious what would come next … the Italians, Germans, Hungarians and Bulgarians were pressing with tanks and motorized infantry from all sides into the country that on a map back in Switzerland had seemed to me very much like a thick bearskin … There were no authorities anymore, no soldiers, no police,
not even any traffic cops … which meant people were free and could do whatever they wanted to each other … Mrs. Hamman and her two gentlemen came with swastikas on their arms to see Vati and brought him a German flag wrapped in paper that he was supposed to hang out the window the next morning … At the time I was at Marko’s house over the shoe store. I was looking out their kitchen window to see what was happening on Town Square … All the flagpoles jutted up empty or had white flags on them, and bedsheets had been hung out some of the windows … Marko’s father was leaning on the window ledge next to me and said, as if to an equal, “That’s it for the circus show … Now things will be different … Hitler’s going to bring order …” I looked him in the eye, because he was sizing me up. The adults were talking in the room where he, his wife, Marko and Tončka slept … they greeted me as though I were already grown up. My God, I was barely twelve … I sat down in the kitchen and waited for Marko to come back … Tončka came up to me … she still had the watch from Velikonja that I’d given to her … I reached out my hand to look at it, and she walked straight in between my arms and knees … she pressed her wide-cheeked face with her corn tassel hair up against me and suddenly put her mouth on mine … The whole kitchen swayed before my eyes from this miracle, this new feeling … Suddenly I didn’t know where I was … in a kitchen or in some golden palace …

That evening the streets came back to life … people were going out to see who would come … the Italians or the Germans … At eleven o’clock Clairi and I walked toward the post office … people were standing pressed against the wall, in courtyard entries, in the
doorways of stores, in case things suddenly started to pop … “I saw them in Trieste,” I heard somebody say in the doorway of Slamič … “They’re so short … dwarves, really …” When it began to rumble, everybody stepped forward: motorbikes! It wasn’t the Germans, it was the Italians on motorcycles with sidecars driving in a long column down Tyrševa Street, three to a vehicle. It wasn’t until they drove under the blue light at Bata shoe store that I noticed their green helmets, round as gourds and sporting black feathers.

T
OWN
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QUARE FILLED UP WITH SOLDIERS
of a different sort … wearing dark green riding breeches and strange horn-shaped caps … a jeep with a German crew and a dusty motorcycle with a side-car were parked outside city hall … The monument to King Peter I had been covered from head to toe with an Italian flag … and up on the Castle a red, white and green flag with a crown and the crest of Savoy fluttered, like the flag from some fairy tale involving princes … People, mostly men and boys, were gathering around the German patrol … Of all of them the officer was the most attractive … covered with dust, young, restrained … People were straining to think of some word in German to say, which struck me as childish but also moved me … The patrol was happy to show them their weapons … machine guns, grenades, and bazookas, which they had whole stacks of right at their feet, next to the steering wheel … They explained how to shoot them, from the shoulder, but before that, how you fit one ring into the next to make the weapon lethal … “What decent people!… One of the soldiers
slept at my house last night … In the morning when he shaved, he didn’t leave the razor blade on the window ledge, no!… he wrapped it up in newspaper and took it out to the toilet in the courtyard …” some slightly daft old man explained to the crowd … In Maribor the tanks and motorized units were welcomed with flowers, flags and music … Even Hitler paid a visit. Pale, the collar of his leather coat turned up, in an army car. Then from the balcony of the city hall he announced that they were going to make Slovenia German again … Many people thought that the Germans were going to come to Ljubljana too. In Lower Carniola peasants carried a sign that read “Da ist das deutsche Reich”
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from village to village … almost into Croatia … Everyone wanted to live under the Great Reich … nobody wanted the spaghetti eaters. The Italians delivered flags by truck from street to street … Mrs. Hamman, who had distributed German flags and ordered them to be hung from every window, was crushed. Her two gentlemen looked rather grim too. Her house was one of the few in a long row of houses that didn’t bask in the sweetshop colors of the Italian flag, instead she put out the deadly serious red flag with its black twin gallows in a white circle … the banner of attack, discipline, war, and death … the four-footed cross that turned like a screw, crushing everything in its path … I had a vague sense that a certain distinction existed in this friendship between Italians and Germans … I understood differences in friendships well and I felt sorry for the Germans, because they’d probably been tricked … Italian martial music filled
Town Square, reaching all the way to the monument to Napoleon and the Casino. They played “Giovinezza” … The drum major tossed his baton with its silver knob as high as the second stories of the buildings … People stood on both sides, laughing, clapping, pleasantly surprised … Elegant Italian officers and their wives went shopping in the stores … Civilians wearing foppish outfits, with handkerchiefs in their coat pockets, strolled in groups of two and three. These were detectives, questurini … The soldiers wearing black shirts and caps with tassels were from Mussolini’s division of Arditi … The uniforms of the Honved officers were odd: instead of buttons they had wooden wedges and on their shirt fronts across from them loops, and they wore square caps with feathers. The carabinieri wore Napoleonic hats … The Germans in their close-fitting uniforms that looked like they’d been poured into them were the only ones that resembled real warriors … In a serious city that was full of books and learned people, the Italian soldiers seemed more like clowns … What they cared about was the women. They bowed right and left and outside the shops they would tip their hats … “Che bella biondina!…” “Che bella signorina!…” They blew kisses from their trucks so intently that sometimes they even fell out of them … They would stop groups of girls on the street and strut around them in their baggy riding breeches, one looking like Stan, the other like Ollie … The girls liked it … they laughed at the Italians … they hadn’t seen soldiers like these ever in their lives … they would retreat from them walking backwards and laughing so hard that they soaked themselves with their tears … Around town … in courtyard gateways, on corners, in stores you could hear various
foreign languages being spoken … a regular Babel, like Basel … The whole world descended on Ljubljana … That buoyed my spirits and I felt relieved … People, antique dealers, porters on Jail Street, women, the Prinčičes’ mother, Andrej’s, Asipi the bootblack … stared, admired, and talked on sidewalks up close or shouted across streets to foreigners wearing a variety of uniforms. The city changed into a different kind of emporium, a different kind of capital … Portraits of King Victor Emmanuel and the Duce wearing a helmet appeared in the shop windows. There was new money in circulation, too, lire. But the bread that we bought from the baker on Jail Street, that was worthless. Like boiled flour, burnt corn. A loaf of it would disintegrate along its furrow. And when you brought it home all you had left in the bag were sticky lumps of mush …