Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

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Back! (German, pronounced with a strong Slovene accent)

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Back to Switzerland! Back to Switzerland! (in German with a Slovene accent)

§

What is it? What have you done now?

‖

I was fetching eggs.

a

Why don’t you ask the two sisters down by the river or Joseph?

b

Karel has put something in the stove.

c

This is a conspiracy.

d

Why does nobody in the world like the Germans?

e

Because they’re arrogant and they always want war.

f

Where did you get the meat from?

AT LAST on some Saturday when he was released from hospital Vati appeared … Pale and haggard in his thick winter jacket, his eyes watery and his hair grayer and thinner. He was barely able to walk the whole way home from our train stop … especially not with that ridiculous skipping walk of his. Once in our room, he had to lie down immediately and then again every so often, or at the very least sit down … He had brought along a paper bag of bread rolls, already half stale, that he’d saved up during his last days in the hospital. They dissolved in coffee, and if you put them in water and mixed in some groats, it made a particular kind of food that did a wonderful job of filling our stomachs … Mother immediately told him everything about the stove and the smoke … Vati got up and went over to visit his brother in his place … In his and mother’s presence, Karel pulled a round piece of painted metal out of the stovepipe. This open admission of his perfidy was an unusually brave act on his part … The stove stopped smoking … but it can’t go on like this, mother told Vati. We can’t take it here any longer. It’s not working. We have to go to Ljubljana. And once we live together, our living expenses are bound to be less, too … Vati had arranged with the train engineer to take him to Ljubljana and back in the luggage compartment for very little money. That was an adventure I envied him for … riding in with the packages, letters and bundles. On Sunday evening he had to go back to Ljubljana so he could be at Elite first thing Monday morning. A railway man helped him up into the green mail car and then slid the door shut … He was going to sell some of the furs from his wicker chest at a loss, he promised before he left, and send us the money for train tickets …

My first semester grades were excellent. How they got that way was a mystery to me. My Slovene was full of mistakes, my notebooks a mess of ink, partly because I wrote my assignments in my bench, sitting on the floor. I was fine at arithmetic because it was simple. Drawing and gymnastics, too. History was all incredible fairy tales … Only the big wall map made me afraid … so many different kinds of details, lines, spots, dots, and stripes for such a little country, as though it were the entire globe. Was anybody still allowed to walk on the earth without having all these maps, rivers, mountains, and parallels in his head?… After school I would go with Clairi and Gisela out to the woods to gather kindling. But also to avoid running into Karel. Still, we stayed close enough to have the yellow house in the meadow with its black-traced windows constantly in view, especially when we left mother home alone … In winter the pine forest wasn’t as dry as a deciduous forest, which turned into a big skeleton on its snowy blanket … One afternoon Clairi was out in the woods with Gisela when I got home from school. I ran into them out in the biggest clearing, where the tracks started to turn. They were talking with the forester, who stood in front of her in his fur hat … All the color had drained from Clairi’s face. “Was mir der Herr Lokar gerade erzählt, ist unglaublich …” *“Ist Wahrheit … Vater von Vater, prapraded, Urgroßvater von Herr Alojz und Karl war Zigeuner …” †“Hörst du das, Bubi?” ‡Clairi asked, looking faint … I looked at him as though he weren’t in his right mind. “So ein Zigeuner, wie die da … die im Steinbruch leben mit Zelten und Pferden?” §Clairi asked, her lips trembling. “Ja, ja,” the earnest forester laughed. “So ist’s. Aber schon lange Zeit her … ein Jahrhundert!” ‖ … I looked out at the road in confusion … The Gypsies I fought with every day … that ate horses, lounging around with their wagons and their women, whose bare nipples showed through their colorful rags … those were supposed to be our ancestors and relatives?!.. Clairi left the forest looking like she’d been felled … “Bubi, das darfst du auf keinen Fall der Mama erzählen. Höchstes Geheimnis!” ashe said severely. Then she laughed, “Und doch … bin ich ein wenig stolz darauf … Veilleicht, weil ich so ängstig bin …” bShe brandished her bundle of branches around her. “Auf wilden Pferden reiten … immer in anderen Orten … wandern … Feuer machen. Uh!” cShe started to dance a little … excited and enraptured … This thing about the Gypsies was news to me … But I still kept fighting with them … Full force, so that we toppled over like bowling pins … They’d swing at my eyes, I’d swing back at them, they’d leg wrestle me, I’d kick them back … they’d grab my thumb in their teeth, I’d rip a whole hank of lice-ridden hair from their scalps. Nobody could have pulled us apart …

In March Clairi and I gathered kindling … it was already dry … It was strange, but somewhere far from here, but not far from where Vati was in Ljubljana … the dark Führer … the thin man with his stubby mustache and his hair parted to one side, with the belt strap going over his shoulder … had marched into Austria once again at the head of his glorious army … Into the city that mother sang about, “Wien, Wien, nur du allein … city of my dreams …” There were photos in the Patriot … A whole forest of upraised arms, flowers, black swastikas like crossed-out gallows or broken extremities in the white circle of their flags … And the tanks, the cavalry, the Heinkel bombers. A whole army of young boys carrying their little Hitler flags, in capes and with drums. The Attila Youth! These kids even had medals pinned to their chests … All of this was in the air … like an invisible, gray soot falling on the Krka. He called to the people, so that they came running down to the Krka to listen to the radio through headphones … Nothing was clear to me … Not far from the clearing we ran into the forester … He whistled softly from behind the trees and took a big portion of cracklings wrapped in newspaper out of his leather shoulder bag. For us!.. Clairi and I didn’t know how to thank him … “A kiss,” said the forester … “OK, but only a peck on the cheek,” Clairi said. But barely had she puckered her mouth when he took her in both arms, with his whole uniform, and squeezed her against him … Smack! Smack! went the kisses … He grabbed ahold of her rear end, her breasts … I was there when Clairi finally fought her way loose, jumped, and shoved him away … flushed red with anger and the abrasion of his whiskers … She stood amid the big clearing, rubbing herself … “Adieu, Herr Lokar … Das dürften Sie nicht machen …” dAnd he had always seemed to be such a decent man. Respectable. Well dressed!.. I picked the bag of cracklings up off a tree stump … there was no way I was going to leave them there for the snakes or foxes … Suddenly a stubborn silence dominated the area by the spring near the forester’s house … I would break the ice with a stone in the mornings to fill a pot with water … The forester’s children came toward me over the grass and surrounded me. They were standing so close that I knew right away what that meant … But I didn’t understand why, because they were good, decent boys and girls otherwise …

*

What Mr. Vorester here is telling me is just unbelievable.