Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

Shortly before Christmas mother and Clairi got sick. They had come down with angina and a high fever, just as they had every year before that. They constantly spat their mucus out onto dry leaves that I set beside their beds and changed several times a day … I had to use the last of our money to buy aspirin at the pharmacy in town. When they had angina in Basel, they would both spend a whole week in bed … The doctor, old Dr. Fritz Goldschmidt, would come to examine them. Gisela and I made our bed on two benches alongside the window … I gathered some twigs and branches … and made quite a comfy nest for us. It reached from under the window practically up to the ceiling. All nicely snapped and bundled. But Vati’s strongbox was empty again, with not the tiniest bean left in it. This was going to be our first Christmas without a tree. The kind sisters from the house down by the water brought us four pieces of cake and a bowl of mush, plus spoons to eat it with. I boiled up some tea in a saucepan. They had lost all their strength and couldn’t eat hard food. They wanted me to fix them a thin flour soup with a beaten egg mixed in. I thought I was going to burst from worrying about them. I wasn’t inclined to ask Jožef for help, much less Karel. Anyway, nobody in the house showed any concern for us anymore. Early, before anyone in the house got up, I crept out to the henhouse built out of an old wardrobe. I climbed up its doors and felt through the straw. There was nothing. Then I went down under the threshing floor. On an anvil, hidden beneath a bundle of straw, there were three newly laid eggs. That was a surprise! I was just on the verge of picking up two of them … when behind me, snap!.. there was Karel with his whip … I burst out crying, and not from the pain … As distinctly as I could I said that my mother and sister were seriously ill and that I had to fix them some burnt flour soup with egg to help them get their strength up. “Zurick! †Put the eggs back! Damn thief!” Karel shouted. I set them back down. “March!” I ran. “Thieves! Damn thieves!” Karel kept shouting. “They’ll steal everything they can get their hands on.” Both of my sisters stepped out of the house and the young hairdresser looked out her window. The whole world was being informed about my shame. “Zurick in die Schweiz! Zurick in die Schweiz!” ‡Mother and Clairi were shaking and colorless, having propped themselves up on their elbows in bed. “Was ist denn? Was hast du wieder angestellt?” §“Eier geholt.” ‖“Warum bittest du nicht die Schwester da unten oder den Joseph?” aI bit my lip. I wasn’t about to try to explain anymore if the women didn’t get it … What if I asked Ciril and Ivan, instead of uncle? We weren’t such good friends anymore … we didn’t even talk to each other at school during breaks … There wasn’t a scrap of food left in the house … There were two locks on the entryway cupboard with flour and lard, one in front and one on the side. I couldn’t go to the old sisters … They had already given us too much on their own … The forester’s children looked at me from their terrace when I came to get water. Probably the whole village had already been informed in detail about my perfidious deed … That afternoon Poldka handed me a small basket of potatoes and carrots through her window. It was enough for a soup. Mica was baking bread when I got back … “Shoo! Get away from here!” she chased me away with big oven tongs, afraid I was going to swipe one of her just-baked loaves of bread, firm and grainy, cooling under a sheet on the table. Saliva practically flooded my mouth … That’s when I decided to do something that might have cost me my life if I’d been caught. I was going to steal some meat from the attic! While Karel and Mica were out tending the pigs, I climbed up in my stockings … one, two, each step separately. I pushed the hatch open and entered a world of hanging hams and sausages … I pulled off a long, moldy salami and even a ham with the hook still embedded in it. And if I ran into Karel?… I’d kill him! Flat out, like an ant underfoot. Plant my foot on his chest so that he’d — wham! — go flying back down the stairs!.. I had such wide eyes that I had to wonder where this place was … This was the life I experienced … its raw, exposed nerve … There was no one in sight …

After that smoke suddenly began coming out of the stove … Every day. The smoke would billow into our room … it stung and we coughed and choked. We opened the window … but the icy wet cold of the snow and the Krka surged in from outside. “Der Karel hat etwas in den Ofen gesteckt.” bWe went to have a look at the smokehouse that the vestibule had become, but we couldn’t discover anything. Gray smoke enveloped the room and crept over its ceiling like steam over a forest … “Das ist eine Verschwörung,” cmother said … One day she came to pick me up at school because my fights at the quarry with the Gypsies showed no sign of abating, and as we reached the train crossing heading out of town, one of Ciril and Ivan’s friends began pelting us with stones and shouting, “Hitler! Hitler!” Mother ran on ahead, but I didn’t want to leave this debt unpaid … I picked up some of the granite ballast from the track bed and began throwing it at him. I wouldn’t relent. They said that Hitler wanted to take over the world. The Patriot , a newspaper that Karel got every Sunday, had pictures. One of them showed a soldier in a resplendent uniform … in his helmet, boots and ribbons, with a pair of binoculars, standing in front of a crossing barrier, on top of which stood another soldier not at all like the first, in a leather helmet with a metal spike on the top and an old-fashioned rifle. “That’s how it started with Austria,” was the caption under the picture. They said that Germany was going to march into Poland or Czechoslovakia … A lot of people went to the forester’s house to listen to his son’s radio. Bit by bit people began to avoid us. “Warum,” I asked mother, “hat niemand auf der Welt die Deutschen gern?” d“Weil sie hochnasig sind und immer Krieg wollen,” eshe answered … Barely would we try to light the stove again than that suffocating wool would permeate the room. That was our punishment from Karel for the ham. I had hid it behind some masonry stones out in the barn wall. I would go there to slice some off, and throw the pieces into a pot with barley and beans. The mixture produced a really hearty soup … “Wo hast du das Fleisch her?” fmother asked. Some I got some from Ciril, some from Jožef, and some from the two sisters, I tried to extricate myself. Oh, if she had known that I’d snatched it from Karel, she would have taken me by the ear straight to him … One evening, when he and Mica weren’t home, I took some ladders from the shed to the back of the house … I set them up by the steps that were overgrown with nettles and climbed up … The rotten wood of the gutter had burst. The black straw roof was covered in ice crystals like the fur of some dog. I grabbed onto the ends of black straw and yanked out a big handful the size of a roofing tile and then on my knees, elbows, and belly somehow made my way up to the chimney. I reached inside … it was cold, but also warm, sticky, dry, hot … I couldn’t see or feel anything … So where was the stuff that had been causing our stove to smoke so unbearably?… Mother got up out of bed and, still dizzy, walked through the vestibule into Karel’s part of the house to talk with him. It was warm and airy there … For a few days there was no smoke, then all of a sudden — whoosh, whoosh! — back it came through the stove door, the seams and three other places in the stovepipe …

*

That’s what happens when you’re stupid … And now I’ve got these empty stomachs to feed again!