Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

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Keep still!

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My room is way out on the outskirts.

ALL HE HAD was a black pot, a plate and utensils for one person. The bed, a table, a chair and the stove in his basement room had been borrowed and belonged to the landlord. “Ein pensionierter Zahlmeister — bei der Marine,” *he explained. The only furnishings that were ours were the wicker chest and the sewing machine that Clairi had brought with her from Switzerland.

The first morning we got up very early … The first thing I actually saw through the window was a miracle. A miracle of red roses entwining some green sticks that had crystal balls on them amid the thorns, reflecting the sky’s blue and the blue house … Right across from the window, which was barely an inch up off the sandy ground!.. I had to get outdoors as soon as possible … “Paß auf!” mother put a hand on my shoulder in warning … My God, the house was so big, three stories tall … Blue, with its windows and doors outlined in white and white bands at the corners. It stood on a big lot of white sand that was neatly and carefully raked … Behind the flowers there was a round pond full of water and a wooden gazebo painted green … The trees behind it were arrayed in thick grass that had been well soaked by the previous night’s rain. The road was visible on the far side of an iron gate set in a high, sculpted hedge … God, where had we come to? A castle, a villa, the estate of some wealthy count? I didn’t dare move from the spot … As though I had downed some concoction, starch?… I just stood there. But there was something else … something that flickered and buzzed in the air … What was it? I couldn’t guess. Behind the house in the middle of the sandy yard there was a big green well, with a gigantic handle jutting out like a train signal … To one side of it, tucked away, was a shed made of boards and white cardboard. I didn’t dare go there yet … That’s where the forest began, which probably wasn’t big … and at the edge of the forest was a wooden hut, an outhouse, and a lime pit. Behind the gazebo, from the lime pit on, a narrow path led alongside the woods to a brown chapel. The Chapel of St. Roch with his dog … The saint was depicted in the garb of a Roman soldier with a sword made of mosaic tiles. He was standing in a desert and pointing to a wound on his thigh. He had blue eyes with rings around the pupils … No matter if I stepped to the right or the left, the saint’s eyes followed me … I went on … behind the hedge was another road, full of dust that intersected with the first one behind the iron gate.

I watched Vati while he shaved, washed from a bucket and put on a celluloid collar. He and Clairi took off for town. To the Elite factory. Just for one day, so she could help him catch up on his backlog … Once they left, we could move quite comfortably around the room … But I ran after them. So I could see more! I walked with them to the intersection of two roads, where there was a smithy in some courtyard and a light affixed to a telegraph pole … They were going down the main road that led straight past fields of grain and clover into town … From there I saw the castle on the hill again, as I had a year before. The grayish brown walls with the square tower and green cupola and the bell tower of who knows what church down below.… Here on the righthand side there was a wall running through the wheat and potato fields into the distance. A path past a gravel pit that had a wheelless wooden wagon in it led that direction. Crosses and tombstones jutted up over the wall. So this was a cemetery …

But the most unusual thing of all was the air, which shimmered … It smelled of water, which must have been flowing full force and in huge quantities through some riverbed somewhere close by … It smelled of the rocks and vegetation that must grow there. Was this why the trees quavered in the air like reflections in water? Some sort of noise surrounded my head on account of it: everything shimmered, moved, trembled, scratched, swarmed, repeatedly making contact in a repeating vision … As though instead of the treetops there was a creature perched on the trees … nature itself, with the folds of its vegetation exposed on all sides … There, in that wet field, in the dense shadow of the trees on the far side of the pond, I was suddenly on some separate planet: quiet, light, mute, unhearing, with no resonance and no echo … How was this possible? As though this was no longer me … This quiet space was somehow contained between the corner of a small stand of forest and a gap in the hedge where, beginning on the far side of a small bench, some quarried rocks lay scattered alongside the road: but from there on, beginning at a house with no stucco and the same gravel pit where I’d seen the gray wagon, that noise and the shimmering of the clear air came back and enveloped me …

Mother rearranged our room. It was five paces from the door to the window and two and a half paces across. The window was big and the walls were blue, with little flowers on them … From now on all four of us were going to sleep in the bed, she said, and Vati would have the table. The stove that was there had outlived its usefulness. A small cooktop with at least two burners and an exhaust pipe for the oven would need to be bought at a rummage store. A chiffon curtain would need to be sewn for over the window … So we wouldn’t have to constantly be going out and in, we would keep a bucket full of fresh water in the room. Its place would be here by the door. Bubi, you are going to look in the woods for a short stump or something similar that we can set the bucket on. Whether or not there was a woodshed we didn’t yet know, so we were going to keep a stack of wood here in the corner and under the stove. Our clothes and underwear would stay in the suitcase for now. We would nail several catches to the door … We would have to be careful in the toilet. It was just a latrine! Each tenant had to clean it once a month with a poker on a pole. So … “Ihr zwei müßt brav sein,” she impressed on us. “Mit niemandem reden, außer das notwendigste. Keinem etwas erzählen über unser Leben. Mit niemandem eine zu große Freundschaft schließen! Still und anständig sich benehmen. Die Leute in Ruhe lassen.” †Gisela, who sat on the bed, washed and brushed and happy, was impossible to stop. Even if she did get into mischief, anybody would have forgiven her. It warmed everyone’s heart just to see her. She was like a daisy gleaming in the grass … “Now to the water hole,” mother decided. So out the door … and to the well for water … into that glorious world I had no idea how to navigate. On tiptoe? On my head? On my hands? When you still don’t have any idea to what or to whom you’re going to belong … Clatter! I set the bucket down on the drain and took hold of a pole hanging down from the handle. Screeeaaaa … it squeaked … it squealed all through the courtyard, the garden, the forest, the sky … I stood there petrified … Already I’d committed my first transgression against peace on earth …

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A retired Navy paymaster.

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The two of you must be good. Say nothing to anyone, except when it’s absolutely essential. Tell no one anything about how we live. Make no close friendships with anybody. Behave modestly and with dignity. Leave people alone.

THERE WAS NEVER A LIGHT on in the vestibule. Steps led from it into the courtyard. I flew over these one-two-three when the baker came calling in the morning, “Kaiser rolls! Sesame rolls! Bread loaves! Baguettes! Croissants!..” The baker was a little man riding a bicycle. With a huge basket on his back and a slightly smaller one over the handlebars … He pulled a cloth off the basket to reveal thin loaves jutting up like lances among the croissants and rolls. I bought a small loaf of cornbread for two dinars … Every morning he pulled up like this outside our courtyard door and announced himself. As though he were paying a call at some landed estate … Who all lived in this building?