Newcomers (5 page)

It was warm outside when we finally went out the door, there were people everywhere, and it was noisy. Horses, trams, bicyclists, the palms outside the front door, the lace curtains over the windows, people with backpacks, women carrying wide baskets on their heads, two boys my age walking past the display windows shirtless and barefoot, which surprised me. Gisela walked on her own, dressed in her little coat and with her cube-shaped hat pushed back off her head and dangling from her shoulders. Vati walked ahead of us, blazing a trail and showing the way. Slowly we reached the corner of the big hotel and turned into the street of tall buildings with wide ledges at the windows – this was the street down which we’d seen the glass castle the night before. Despite all the noise it was muffled, tepid and thick like a warm compress over our ears. The street was full of people whom I would see just that instant, of course, and then never again, because they would disperse all over the world. A big gray building with a fence right in front of its facade resembled a building in Basel … Much farther down the street there was a brownish building with statues on top. That one was truly impressive. It was just a shame the statues didn’t include any children or flags … The sidewalk was wide. Alongside it there were thin, yellowish brown carts on two tall wheels. Big white bundles of sheets lay on them … maybe the very same ones from the hotel … and milk canisters with handles. At the end of the street part of the green hill was visible and the brown end of the castle. I ran to join father. “Vati, werden wir auf das Schloß gehen?”
^§
“Ja, nach
dem Mittagessen.”
^‖
“Es wird keine Zeit mehr übrig bleiben,”
^a
said mother, who joined us with Gisela sitting on her shoulders. “Wir müssen mit dem ersten Zug fahren.”
^b
I made a bad face. Then, walking in the broad shade on the right side of the street, we came to the display window of a butcher’s shop where something tiny was moving. Behind the big cuts of meat and loaves of cheese garnished with parsley, there was a procession of tiny, white, spotted cows that kept disappearing into a little white house, out of which on the other side came stubby, fat, bean-colored sausages, which then turned a corner behind some cheese and bacon before disappearing from view. This was like that goose at the Macreus shop at home, that lifted its wings in the display case full of white down, and then each time it flapped, more feathers came fluttering down from the ceiling like snow. But this display was more interesting. I exchanged glances with Gisela, who also wanted to look. She was craning her neck over mother’s shoulder and pushing the brim of her hat down, so that mother finally had to stand still and turn her back slightly toward the display window. The little cows kept trundling down their semi-circular path toward the little white house, coming out of it as stubby, fat sausages. Mother took just one look at the cattle being converted into ground meat, and then was ready to move on. “Nein, nein, ich schaue noch.”
^c
But mother went on to the corner as fast as Gisela would allow, even
though she was pounding her little fists on her shoulder. I stayed standing in front of the display window. The little cows, all identical, with bells on their collars, all came at the same speed, disappearing through the little open door one after the other. They called me to come. Gisela, who still wanted to look, was pounding on mother’s back. I dawdled so I could figure out where exactly the little cows were coming from, but I couldn’t make anything out. All I could see were their horned heads appearing from under a mountain of cheese, more or less out of nowhere, and advancing like a column of soldiers before going under some ham into the little white house. It was the same deal with the browned sausages. They vanished toward the back into an abyss much like the one the little white cows with their tiny black hooves emerged from. It was impossible to discover or figure out how the processing took place, much less any trick behind it. Vati came back to get me, he looked at the transformation, then he took me by the arm and dragged me away from the display pane. Mother was waiting at the corner. Oh, how pleasant it was to walk on the asphalt that was soft as dough in that warm city. At home on the Luisenplatz or in the rue de la Couronne it was always as hard as rock. “Folge ein wenig. Wir müssen eine Menge Sachen erledigen,”
^d
mother said. As we crossed the street, people looked at her and at Gisela, but also at Vati and me, as if through wooden masks. Big copper disks had been embedded in the roadway for the pedestrian crossing and both rows of shiny buttons reminded me of Basel. There, at the intersection of rue Helder and the Bahnhofstraße there were disks just like these,
and it startled me a bit to find them here, too, so far away from home by train, and at the same time I was happy, because I knew what they were for. Now I already had two things that were like home. On the other side of the street we walked past a tall building into a rather dirty little side street. It had display windows with black ledges and black doors, like coffin lids, and in front of them there were crates with bones and ashes, but there was a gold barber’s plate, which I also recognized, jutting out from the wall. Eventually we made our way to a short, one-story wooden building, painted violet blue, with small windows and tiny little shutters and with a dark blue printed sign hanging from it with white letters spelling F O T O … Aha, this I could understand! On account of the short buildings all around in this neighborhood the sky had become even more bottomless, almost threatening, hot and glowing from the blurred sharpness of the fog-shrouded sun, and this made the building seem even older and darker from close up. The pictures in the display windows showed men with oatmeal-colored skin and fair-skinned women, girls with wreaths on their heads, soldiers wearing stiff, coarse uniforms and monstrously huge caps like kettles, with long, thin, curved sabers hanging next to the seams of their trousers … the hand guards on the sabers were almost hidden under tassels, pompons and ribbons … The better, more elegant, best-groomed ones had wide, gleaming tablets on their shoulders, high-peaked caps with big coats of arms that featured a half moon with stars, stripes on their trousers and boots. They sat with their sabers between their legs or next to them. They looked a little wild, and that was fine, but also a bit odd and bereft, as though they
were slightly deranged. In one picture I discovered something I could relate to: a boy in a sailor’s shirt and cap sitting on a wicker chair like one we had at home … Heaps of sand and masonry stones lay in the street. Mother flushed red with anger and shame when she had to step up by crossing a board. Dark-skinned men stood in the ditches, working with picks and shovels, but without jackhammers or other equipment. They were naked down to the waist and watched as she walked over the plank. They had dark eyes, hooked noses, regular features like in the movies, prominent jaws and heads that came to a point at the crown. With their white caps and kerchiefs on their heads they looked like regular heathens or pirates. The faces lined up in the ditch, one after the other, all looking at us. They were smiling. I had never before seen such beautiful, white, powerful fangs, as though they had nothing but cream in their mouths. When we got to the end of the ditch, mother set Gisela down and began to whine. “Das ist das Gasthaus,”
^e
Vati said, pointing down a narrow street that was literally baking in the sun. As we crossed the narrow street, my sandals sank up to the ankles in thick, hot dust mixed with bits of stone. An old lamp hung over the entrance to a modest building. On the wall next to it there was a painting of a white-haired gentleman in a dazzling, embroidered, gold-braided jacket. In his right hand he was raising a glass and looking through it. “Ist dieser Anzug aus Gold?”
^f
I asked Vati … “Ja, es scheint so,”
^g
he answered.

We finally arrived in uncle’s town in the middle of the night. The station was an ordinary peasant house. Uncle wasn’t waiting for us, even though we’d sent him a telegram. There was a dark forest right in front of us and not a single streetlamp on the road. Neither on the left, in a depression that had standing water in it … a regular lake that was impossible to cross … nor on the right, where the road climbed a sort of hill, beyond which it was pitch dark … We set our suitcases down on top of some logs and a coal monger’s bags in a shack next to the tracks … We took with us only the bag in which our nightshirts were packed. Since we’d been spattered with wet coal dust, we wiped ourselves off with bits of cardboard that were lying around. We stayed standing outside the closed little station to give father time to figure out which way we should go. Mother was on pins and needles. But here, in the place where he grew up, she could at least trust him a little … Yes, he suddenly recalled some shortcut, a path that he often used as a child to go to school and also to come home, when he’d return to the village. The path was up there somewhere, way at the top of a hill, and then led back down to the water …

We headed uphill. To one side there was a long wall that rose up with the road from the train tracks and some monstrously mighty body of water that roared down below … I felt the wall with my hand. It was made out of coarsely hewn stone and was full of gaps and bits of flint. A regular rampart! But I was more interested in the body of water that was splashing around down there … It hung in the air with the rain, like an ocean that was cooling my head from afar and giving me shivers … Vati walked so far ahead of us that he vanished from sight.
We caught up with him again at the top. He was standing next to some black bushes in front of a wall. “Da hinunter müssen wir gehen, glaube ich,”
^h
he said with a note of guilt in his voice. “Einen anderen Weg kenne ich nicht.”
ⁱ
He pushed some dripping branches aside. Between the leaves and the wall appeared a gap leading into a veritable abyss. “Was?” exclaimed mother, who wouldn’t have been visible at all if she hadn’t been dressed in white … But there was no other way out. Vati headed down the steep slope first, with a suitcase and a lit sulphur match, then, like it or not, mother followed holding Gisela, who fortunately wasn’t crying, because she wasn’t a whiny child by nature … with me, carrying mother’s bag, coming last. The leafy branches all around rustled and snapped, surprised to find us hugging the ground with them … I had never before penetrated such a jungle. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of me. For an instant in the faint glow of a match I noticed some rods within a circle of blistered trees … no, a bunch of snakes standing upright!… and on the moleskin spread out all around them were sea shells, smashed snails and soft, white, broad-capped mushrooms, toadstools – the poisonous ones from the Schwarzwald … I began to feel afraid, especially at my back. But here I was in Vati’s country, after all!… I seized onto every solid thing that came into my fingers … there were so many leaves, like a dark, thick, slippery carpet, that they stood upright like weasels, scratched my hands and caused me to keep sliding forward. My God, what if I do
a somersault and crack my head open on the fork of some bush! I was staring so intently into the dark that my eyes started to hurt. But each time I went flying again … into some forked branch, hanging vine or tree trunk … or were they all so happy to see me that they kept clumsily bumping into me?… I tried to walk crouching down to trick anything that might have been lurking in the dark brush … I expected Vati any instant to run into some monster, beast or robber that would proceed either to eat or to strangle him, so I got ready to beat a quick retreat back uphill or die here on the spot. And why shouldn’t I die? Alive or dead, I was in some sort of paradise here … I never imagined that a tunnel like this would await me in Vati’s country … full of branches, endless, dark and with no way out. Here and there to the left or right I smelled something that was ready to leap to my rescue … It was the stench of rotting trees and human excrement … but there was no way I was going to be able to get off the smooth shoulders of this slippery earthworm that I was sliding down. Various things that I had just barely avoided or at least forced into submission resumed their former shape behind me and turned wild again. No, there were no insidious ravines like this even in the hills around Urach. If I could only slide downhill using my rear as a sled, it would have been safer and so much more fun …

Suddenly the path became lighter and I heard a hollow, insistent sound. Mother was already standing … I stepped onto level, slushy ground … the humid air was just as heavy from the rain as the ground was wet with it … I saw Vati, transformed into a shadow against the bright ground … So this was probably the meadow with molehills,
and next to it some other flat space was splashing, spraying and pounding … Water! I stumbled over to the suitcase, then to Vati, who was standing far away. His suit reeked and hung from him like a tent. Out of the dark he said to me in his usual voice, “Das ist der grosse Fluß.”
^j
The river! The same one he had told me about? I ran over to see it … Right next to some trees and bushes turned upside down on their heads an enormous, wide body of water was gushing … leaping and racing past like the back of some gigantic lizard … a dance floor wildly spinning all the way to its middle, where a black shadow fell out of the sky over the unseen far bank … But here it was spraying the trees and bushes with its foam, gurgling in the grass around my shoes, as though it were washing the trees … In life you only rarely see anything as awful and glorious as this. My eyes practically fell out of their sockets trying to see more. So for once Vati hadn’t pulled the wool over my eyes.

There was a little path wending its way under the trees by the water … and father was first to set out on it … It was slushier, as though it had been sprinkled with pebbles … It led toward some black shadows that loomed tall and round against a brighter sky … Like thrones, fortress walls, and big theater balconies … Or maybe also like a jungle or an upland plateau … A real exotic landscape! There was a winter chill but also such a cheerful sound wafting to us from the water, that I could have had ice cream just as though it were summer … On the far side there was emptiness – a big, strange,
soft meadow that suddenly rose up in the vicinity of some shrub-like shadows … not too far off, since otherwise our voices wouldn’t have echoed as they did. It was clipped off even by a white line at the top, and above that there was a sort of mountain that ate the white line. In a way it resembled a machine I had seen before. Only its dimensions weren’t such that people were like dwarves alongside it. I ran to catch up with Vati. His soaked suit and shoes made slapping sounds as he walked. He turned his head back, “Das ist die Eisenbahn mit dem Tunnel.”
^k
How could I be so stupid! Of course, this was a hillside with railroad tracks and a tunnel that went through the hill. Like the picture on the cover of the box for my train set in Basel. I was only now seeing it in its proper dimensions and from close up for the first time. This … not some dumpy train station with schedules and wooden waiting rooms, was the proper domicile for a locomotive that roamed the whole world …