Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

After that Karel took me along to a livestock auction. To assuage a bad conscience, out of remorse? Unfortunately he planned to sell Liska there … She swatted her tail back and forth behind us on the path over the train tracks as we led her uphill and alongside a road. First him, then me, by turns. With her in the middle and one of us on each side, not together … At the market, in simple pens there were hundreds and hundreds of cows. Some horses, mostly dray horses. Pigs. Goats. A lot of fowl, too. Noise, dust … plenty of good manure went to waste under hoof and underfoot at the market that day. I studied the peasants, the laborers, the shepherds big and small. I stood next to Liska … actually, I sat on a box of feed belonging to the next peasant over … Liska was not in a good mood. She wanted to lie down and have a good nap … Uncle Karel came back with some company. He brought me a bottle of šabesa . This was a sweet drink with lilac and lemon that instead of a cork had two little balls in the neck of the bottle … Everyone was covered in sweat, as though they were dying. I saw some big money … oh, let me tell you about all the banknotes, enough to paper whole walls … going from hand to hand … Overall, though, the peasants were low-key. Karel didn’t sell anything … Though he tried … He called on God as his witness … I saw him as if on a stage: his earnest face … his cheerful face … his clever face … We went home. We tied Liska up to a tree outside the railway station and went into a restaurant where insects were flying around the rotten potatoes and it smelled of hard liquor … He ordered two servings of goulash … and rolls, a whole mountain of rolls … The goulash was too spicy for me, even though it was delicious … But the rolls! This was the first time I’d tasted white bread in three months!.. The taste of their soft centers reached my nose, my eyes, almost my brain. Karel started to drink with a group that had gathered. I went out to join Liska … ripped up some grass for her … and came back. My uncle was drinking with his buddies at a round table. He introduced me, and the bowlegged peasants took as much interest in me as I did in them … He forced me to drink a little glassful no bigger than a thimble … with a swallow of brandy at the bottom. I didn’t like it. He laughed, but again his eyes were not laughing. Oh God, was I scared. This was really a bad sign …

Then I was outside during a storm for the first time. We were pulling up turnips in the rain in Karel’s field on the far side of the tracks, not far from the shack of the crazy woman down from the bright house that stood up there as if it was on stilts. We threw a whole expanse of their tousled leaves, their long mottled feathers up onto a cart … a first one, a second, a third … It was pleasant, I was wearing my shorts, and the rain and dirt had done a thorough job of soaking and spattering me … Everyone was grinning … we had a common enemy, the downpour … “Bubi, quick … what fun!” they shouted. My happiness was showing through all the layers of mud … but I also took care not to say anything … That’s just what they’re waiting for!.. The sky was literally bearing down on the black woods like an enormous log of coal … then some terrible flash … white! blinding! — as though God wanted to show us an X-ray of some enormous lungs full of black clouds, or the fury in his eyes through lightning … Click! Click! Click!.. Ka-BOOM!.. as if some huge porcelain marble had just shattered to pieces. And the rain … whole rivers of rain. We were all soaked to the skin, it poured onto us as though off an eave. Stanka was wearing some sort of light gown … with all of her contours showing through, her breasts, her hips, her rear end — so the beauty had a body, after all!.. The rain was as hard as a body … it stuck to everything, and we almost couldn’t work our way through the furrows back to the cart … But the most important thing was the thunder, the downpour, the lightning, and that no one was afraid, nobody hid, we were all just grinning like fools … I hopped around in a puddle on one leg, I didn’t care … I opened my mouth wide and guzzled the water that came streaming down off a broken branch … Others came and joined me, I wasn’t alone. That’s what was important!..

One day Vati finally moved. He had found a job at the headquarters of the Elite Company in Ljubljana. He had also found a room. He left on a Sunday evening. He promised to come back every Saturday and bring his week’s wages. Or send it by mail. It wouldn’t be much, since he would have to deduct his room and board … He also took his wicker suitcase with him on the train. That’s where he kept his hides and the last of his furs from Basel. He would use these to sleep on, since the room he was renting was unfurnished, because that way it was much cheaper. But in his free time, he said, he was going to sew muffs out of animal skins, fur hats, collars … whatever the world wanted of fashion at the moment, and he would sell them from door to door …

Now mother, Gisela, and I were alone … without him. Mother told me, “Du mußt slowenisch lernen, daß wir uns mit den Stritzen besser verstehen.” dOf course I wanted to, but … On Monday morning there was a lock on the well, so that we wouldn’t be tempted to draw water out of it in spite of the ban … Consequently, every morning I went first thing down to the spring, so that I wouldn’t run into anybody. At first with a bucket, then with a bowl, and finally with bottles … I had to put up a healthy supply … who could say what Karel would think up that day … he might, for instance, lock us into the house, or he might lock us out of it … The water flowed between two marly stones … and was as pure as crystal … with a little fish swimming in it every now and then … you had to be careful not to dirty the water … Now and then the woodsman came walking across the footbridge. He was a muscular, red-cheeked, gray-haired man. He wore a kind of gray uniform with a green stripe on his knickers. He tended the forests alongside the railway line all the way to the end or the start of the Krka. This well, which everyone was welcome to draw from, was also his … He stepped across the narrow footbridge in his leather leggings. I pretended not to have seen him. In our room mother cooked on a small round stove. She was short of lard … and she didn’t want to subject herself to the humiliation of asking Karel for more. Neither did I. I just knew when I needed to head out to pasture … with Liska, and Gray … and when I needed to clean out the barn. That was all. I snuck into the kitchen. With a spoon I swiped a bit of lard out of the cupboard in the entryway and evened out its surface at the top of the black pot. And if they did notice … then it could also have been rats, which had already consumed a quarter of what was up in the attic, anyway … Mother stayed in our room and constantly complained. She would pace back and forth, nervously balling her hands into fists. “Warum sind wir hierhergekommen … Warum sind wir nicht nach Saarbrücken gegangen, zu meinen Brüdern nach Saarlouis. Was für ein Dasein! Was für ein Misgeschick!” eI couldn’t stand to listen to it anymore. Everywhere we had been, she had just complained … in Basel … in our upper floor room in the Gerbergässli … in the old house next to the park with the police station in it … in the nice building next to the Christian brothers’ school … on the Elizabethplatz … in the rue Helder … even the rue de Bourg, where we had a whole floor to ourselves …

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What is old slant eyes saying again?

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Something about mass, that she can’t go to church wearing this dress.

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You not any work there!

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Come back here! (pronounced with a strong Slovene accent)