Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

Much later, several weeks after our arrival, he and I set out for an air show at the airport … Old Baloh, Štef and Marija also went with us … We took side paths and shortcuts and snuck through a beech grove so we wouldn’t have to pay admission at the airport … The meadow was full of banners and people. The planes did all kinds of acrobatics and flew flags on their tails … sky-divers jumped out of them … and gliders released pigeons from cages … Vati discovered that the handiest thing to do was to lie down in the grass and look up at everything flying and doing loops, at the cupolas of chutes opening up in the air. That’s when I got in the practice of lying down to look at the sky, at stars and clouds …

Back at home everything was out of joint again. Bang! Vati sat down at the table with his back turned to mother and began sewing a fur with a thread three feet long … jerking his arm way up over his head. Whirrrr! mother started nervously working the pedals of her sewing machine … That the two of them had ever hugged? Impossible … Vati kept carping the whole time at Clairi about Gisela. But she wasn’t afraid of him. She would walk right past his chair to mother or me, as though Vati wasn’t even there … Clairi would come home from Elite completely worn out … on foot, more than an hour’s walk, in order to save the money she would otherwise have spent for a streetcar ticket. Her heart was acting up. It was throbbing all the way up near the armpit. She had to lie down … She always held her hands turned forward when she walked, or turned up when she was lying down. While she was resting, I was tempted to turn them over at the wrist, to correct her posture … but I left her alone, because she would have hit me if I did … She had a tremendous desire to eat her fill of a variety of fine dishes, especially cakes. For lunch she and Vati would always sit in the park and have some slices of bread and a bit of salami, and now and then they would treat themselves to an apple … “Heute,” she told me when we were alone, “bin ich einem älteren Herrn so sehr aufgefallen, daß er mich eine Stunde angestarrt hat … aber Vati saß leider die ganze Zeit bei mir. Vielleicht, Bubi, werde ich einmal einen feinen älteren Mann treffen, der mich trotz Gisela heiraten wird. Dann wirst du etwas zu staunen bekommen: uns allen wird es wie durch einen Zauber gehen …” iShe believed that eventually somewhere in the world she was going to meet an understanding man who was smart and not too old, who would give her everything … clothes, a decent house, travel, perfumes … and with whom she would have a nice life, not like mother and Vati’s … “Nur warum wurden wir auf die Welt gestellt von diesen zwei, die sich nie verstanden haben?” jThat was too complicated. That part I didn’t understand. Welt, monde, svet! That part was nice! A garden with shiny globes, paths, flowers, roses, gazebos, striped lounge chairs, swimming pool … a forest, fields, and the Sava flowing through white gravel … The world was magnificent! It looked boldly up at the sky like a baby … Clairi pressed me to herself, as though I were her husband, and rubbed her cheek against my shoulder … Was I supposed to believe that she was just my sister, a child of Vati and mother like myself?… I couldn’t … She belonged more to people who were constantly arguing … that jungle where eyes got lost even close up … where chaos came to life in the most colorful way, and which excluded any sense of rules or regular patterns of repetition … I fled to join the boys and girls from Jarše in the woods, where at least something was happening.

*

Why didn’t you assume Swiss citizenship back then? Why did you trust those suppliers with all of our money that time? Why didn’t you join the chamber of commerce when you could have?

†

What did they ask you?

‡

Didn’t I tell you …

§

They’re all a bunch of murderous low-lifes.

‖

Why did we come here, when we had the option of going to Germany?

a

What are they saying this time? What were they just laughing at?

b

They’re going to do something against me because I’m German.

c

No shenanigans! And if anybody asks you anything, call for me.

d

My mother will answer that.

e

What do you want from the child?

f

Stay with the laundry so they don’t get it dirty or steal it.

g

Let’s run!

h

Let me go! Let me go!

i

Today I made such an impression on an older gentleman in Tivoli that he stared at me for an hour … but unfortunately Vati was sitting with me the whole time. Maybe, Bubi, one day I’ll meet an elegant older man who will marry me in spite of Gisela. Then you’ll be amazed: we’ll all live an enchanted life …

j

Why did we have to be brought into the world by these two, who have never gotten along?

ON THE FAR SIDE of our landlord’s back hedge there was a one-story house of unplastered brick. So carelessly thrown together, with the bricks jutting out of the walls, that I could have built it better … One afternoon, several days after we arrived, I noticed an unkempt dark-haired girl in a red dress who looked exactly like Anica. She was standing on the other side of the gap in the hedge, looking at me. I pointed my hand toward the area between her legs and dropped my shorts. She lifted her skirt up and pulled down her panties. Due to the leaves I couldn’t quite make out her bun or she my pee-pee … She waved for me to come around the hedge and join her … Her mother, I’d heard, had once been a cook at the royal court. But which one? The court of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef or the castle of the young King Peter, who parted his hair on the side like Hitler?… Next to the road before her house there was a brown wooden shack with curtained windows and a sign that said POP — ŠABESA. A young woman lived in this wooden structure who wore a wide, flouncy, rustling skirt of coarse silk. They called her the “basket” and said that every night a different man stayed over in her shack, which had once been a sweet shop … In front of the cook’s house there was a field with kale and beans. The girl resembling Anka, Adrijana, was already waiting for me there … The house was as sooty and scabby as a barn … the dirt floor littered with cinders … Straps and hoes hung from the unfinished walls in the vestibule. Adrijana had a little and a big brother, who was a baker and had a new racing bicycle … She wiggled her blackened fingers at me to come in … In the middle of a big room with brick walls whose floor was also scattered with cinders, there was a big stove made of stone, resembling a well, with its stovepipe leading up through a hole in the roof. With little scoops, rakes, rusty shovels, chisels and black pots hanging everywhere … In a corner beneath the paneless window there was a bunk under a big heap of rags … I stopped and had a good look around. That’s what I always did to get used to a new place. It wasn’t the poverty that frightened me, but how hollow the house was. So this was the home of a woman who had once worked at the royal court, where everything gleamed golden and alabaster. I wasn’t surprised, because as early as Steinenvorstadt I had seen lots of people — rich merchants, including Vati — who lost everything overnight and then lived like beggars in some miserable room … Adrijana took me by the hand and led me over to the stove … It contained a whole wheelbarrow full of fatty soot and ashes heaped up to the edge … When I leaned over to look in, Adrijana squeezed my balls in her hand, causing my pee-pee to hurt, and I squeezed her bulge through her skirt. I was looking around to find some corner of the room we could go to hug, when Adrijana led me to the bunk … Then something stirred and rose up … and the face of the dwarfish cook looked out of the rags … broad, flat, tiny and so covered with spots that it resembled a pan full of dried cracklings … I said Koot tay and ran out of there as fast as I could.