Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

The unusual piece of equipment outside the house consisted of a block on two legs, a beam, a spindle with a wiry rope and a bucket with a dish-like little roof over it. It was Karel’s invention! He showed it to us first thing: he turned a crank, like on automobiles … and the bucket took off down a wire and splashed into the water, which was a milky green from all the branches of bushes it had torn off in the storm … then he turned the crank in reverse, producing squeaks that reached to the far shore and up to high heavens … returning the bucket, now full of water which uncle used for the livestock, and setting it back on the shelf under its little roof. The only thing missing was for it to salute you! This was a real revolution!.. But in addition to this apparatus there was also a well in front of the house with water you could drink. When we bent over it, our heads met against the backdrop of the sunny sky on its round watery bottom as if on a golden platter … So many different things in such a small space! The casks and kettles standing on stones were pots that they cooked carrots and turnips in, then used blocks mounted on sticks to mix and strain them for the pigs … Between this house and the neighboring house, which was much uglier, there was a handsome rooster, a glorious bird, standing atop a black heap of leaves and animal manure. His hens, as they pierced the surroundings with their eyes, pecked their way over to Gisela and me, showing no fear of us … Then followed their chicks, little balls of yellow fluff that kept tumbling over the leaves. We reached our fingers out toward them, but uncle and aunt said something to each other and turned away, as though we’d done something bad …

The house next to the heap was long, grayish brown and made out of stone and wood. It was covered with black straw like the one we had slept in, except it was already old and full of white and green moss. In one part of it, which was dark with a muddy window, there was a barn for the livestock … Big, warm, handsome gray cows, rectangular and almost white … In the pen next to them pigs jostled each other … this was the first time I’d seen these fattest, dirtiest and most gluttonous of all animals in the world … whose name got thrown at the most terrible people … Horribly fat, pink under their whiskers, they shoved their snouts in their neighbors’ rear ends and their rear ends at their neighbors’ heads, their ears big as omelets … I saw two or three little piglets, the poor things … so young and already pigs … One of them … a big hog with its nostrils inflamed like a baby’s bottom, suddenly snapped at my hand, which I was holding over the fence. Uncle laughed at this … To the right of the entrance there was something resembling a bed, full of leaves and rags. “Da schläft der Hirt vom Onkel Karel,” dVati said. Mother looked horrified … finally she was getting to see a farm for the first time, too … Up next was a narrow passageway with an old cupboard. That’s where the hens slept, and up at the top in the hay is where they laid their eggs … Right next to that was some sort of room with heaps of grain on the floor and a bunch of long sticks, each one tied with a cord to the others. Uncle showed us how it worked: he started swinging one of them, and with the others, which began to spin on the cord over his head, he thrashed at the floor … He motioned to me to try it, but I couldn’t make it work … A free-hanging stick slapped at my face like a billy club … In the middle there was also some equipment that resembled Vati’s square sewing machine for working with fur. Uncle got it going with his leg and cut off a sheaf of straw … bzzz! bzzz! Quickly I hid behind the grown-ups so he wouldn’t call on me again to try it.

*

Where’s father?

†

He went to the train station with your uncle to get the suitcases. Ah, we have to go down to the water and wash our things.

‡

What that?

§

Oh! Pane, window, fenêtre.

‖

If we could have afforded a stove and hearth like this in Basel, we would have saved a lot of money.

a

That’s where we’ll live.

b

Does that room belong to us?

c

Yes, daddy sent some money from Switzerland so that your uncle could build it.

d

This is where Uncle Karel’s shepherd sleeps.

OUTSIDE THERE WAS some kind of door lying on the ground with sharp nails turned upward … A fakir’s bed?… And a longish, bent wooden thing with handles and a sharp, wide blade, a real guillotine … Hanging from pegs were round gray sticks with curved Turkish sabers … Karel showed us: whoosh! whoosh!.. he used them to cut the grass, which went falling in rows. Up above there was an opening with no door over it … which you reached on a ladder … I wasn’t careful enough, because uncle grabbed me, put me on the ladder and shoved me up. The rungs sagged like rubber … some dry grass was poking out of the hole way up above just under the ladder … Uncle held onto me tight and kept pushing me higher … but the upper end of the ladder moved and I was going to fall any second and take it with me as I splashed into the water … Everything started to spin underneath me … the heads, uncle, the river, the building. “Nein! Nein!” mother shouted … When I was back down on the ground, uncle laughed so hard he stomped all over the grass in his shoes … and the glistening grass was far more attractive than him … Under the ladder there was a sort of hollow made of compacted red dirt. You got to it by going down a slope … it contained firewood, axes, bags full of things, fastened, all stacked neatly up to the ceiling.

At the end of the building the meadow began to drop off … toward the big body of water. There were smooth, wide stones on its bank. Karel said something. “Da waschen die Weiber die Wäsche,” Vati translated. Fantastic! “Was?” mother gasped … But where were the boats and horses?… The water was gray, green, black … full of eddying waves and ripples that sank in the middle of the river or expanded in rings. On the other side was the forest, a proper black forest of slender black pines, standing there like hundreds of bell towers … Not until we headed back did we see how extensive the meadow was … it was at least three hundred meters from here to the railroad tracks. There were a lot of spheres hanging in the dense crowns of the trees there. Green, red, and yellow. Small, egg-sized, blue. Apples and plums! I barely recognized them from the ground … until then I had only seen them in crates and at fruit vendors’ stands … “Habe ich es recht verstanden … ich soll am Fluß die Wäsche waschen?” mother asked in shock. Uncle said something to Vati. Vati answered him. Karel laughed. But when he saw mother’s face, her incensed, gaping mouth, the laugh turned into a guffaw …

I ran off as fast as my legs would carry me. I stopped in front of the house. I had no idea where I wanted to go. But then I remembered what I had intended to do earlier: go look at the room we had slept in from the outside, through the window … Now it was all by itself. I saw its white walls, both narrow beds, the high stove in the corner, the glass globe of the lantern (now out), both pictures with the bleeding heart over our aunt’s bed, the flickering light in the red glass, the cross with Jesus … Some straw poking down past the wooden gutter scratched at my neck.

Then we washed our shoes in water and set them out in the sun to dry. Nervously, as always, mother sewed a button onto the shirt I was wearing tucked into my pants, the button I had lost the night before … Then suddenly from very close by we heard the whistle of a locomotive and tshhh! tshhh! tshhh!.. I ran around to the other side … It was a train just then approaching the crossing with the crucifix near uncle’s fence … A steam engine with two cars attached … Like a ghost appearing in the wilderness. For the first time ever I saw the engineer, a swarthy man, from close up. He was leaning out his open window, wiping his hands with a red rag. Then the people in the cars appeared. Wearing scarves and simple hats, they were standing and looking out of square windows that looked like they’d been sawed out of the sides of the ordinary cars. It didn’t seem like a real train to me, more like a procession of horse-drawn carts. At any rate, it made a proper “toot-toot!” The locomotive was genuine enough, with an enormous cow-catcher up front. Its movement past uncle’s huge meadow was neither fast nor slow. As though it were out for a walk … At the end of the train I could see the gray wall of its last car disappearing into the black pine forest. And then the smoke bending up out of the woods. A train right out my front door and every day, at that!