Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

Once after school I got to go visit Elite … It was a big sewing workshop, full of machines and men in vests cutting, measuring and sewing around a big extensible tailoring table … Vati worked around the corner, with the work in his lap, because he didn’t have a place at the table. Clairi sewed in the back behind some thick, brown tarp. She had to hide, I don’t remember from whom … the boss, the owner or the police … because she was working illegally … I didn’t understand … All I knew was that the men in vests at the big table were paying her directly out of their own pockets, because she was helping them. I went with both of them to Tivoli and then once with Clairi to visit her friend Marica, who worked in an ice cream parlor on St. Peter’s Road … This was a big establishment that had to be electrically lit even in daytime. Marica was pretty, blonde, and dressed all in white like a hairdresser … Not only did she have blue eyes and black eyelashes, but even her eyelids were blond, like a forest maiden’s … She brought each of us a piece of cake at her expense and then chatted with us as though we had paid her … The way home was much longer … and if I didn’t stop by the shed with the soldiers, all the more so. Mother cooked beans and potatoes or macaroni, if she had any, and mixed in an egg every once in a while. But our biggest holiday was on Saturdays, when they both got their pay from the tailors … I went out as far as the light at the intersection to meet them and when I saw the loaf of bread and the package of butter in Clairi’s shopping net, I immediately broke off a whole heel, even though my sister tried to prevent it.

By the end of the school year I hadn’t passed. Teacher Roza assembled all of us for our final lesson. It was quite ceremonial. In a vase there were red and white roses with a tricolor ribbon wrapped around them. The boys were on pins and needles, red in the face and all of them sweating. Each of them had brought some present for the teacher … downright elegant little packages with a ribbon, or at least a bouquet of flowers. Miss Roza called out each name separately … You’re going to have to repeat third grade, she said to me when she handed me the big, rigid report card … all ones and twos, barely any threes … I was a little disappointed. This big document … with the stamp of the government and the white royal seal was going to trigger a tragedy, if I thought about my parents … After distributing the report cards Miss Roza gave us a short speech. All year long I’ve been looking at one of the boys in this class, she said, and thinking for the longest time that he had a terrible blemish under his forehead. Then one fine day I realized that he has such big, dark eyes … “Who? Who?” everyone shouted right and left. Our Lojze, the teacher said … So that meant I was handsome?! I realized to my delight … It was hot as I walked home and I was hungry enough to eat even wild chestnuts, if there had been any, even though they’re as bitter as soap … I went straight to visit the soldiers out in the field, guarding their crops from their shack … They were true giants with upturned mustaches, big shoes and caps that made them look like they were wearing pots on their shaven heads … But they were so friendly, you would have thought we were the same age. They knew as little Slovene as I did and that’s why we got along. I sat in their dark shack, with them reclining on their metal cots, which were for the cavalry. Now and then they would offer me a piece of toast left over from breakfast, because they were hungry every day, too … they showed me their rifles … such clumsy ones that they would go off when they took them down off the wall, or wouldn’t when they tried to shoot them. They looked at my catechism with its color pictures of the creation of the world, the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve … everything that happened up to the birth of Jesus … and then the pious widows who accepted the infant John the Baptist in the New Testament … I said that I would sell them the catechism, which belonged to the school, for a fourth of a loaf of bread or, in other words, a day’s ration of army sourdough … I sensed I was doing wrong, but I had to gather some strength … At the far end of the field was a barrel of water that they called their rain gauge. I hesitated a bit. “One must pay the utmost attention to documents, all one’s life,” mother had always stressed. She was thinking of passports, birth and christening certificates, various receipts, papers, and confirmations. I folded up the stiff report card and submerged it in the water barrel, then I tore off a white wad of it and shoved it into a molehill … At home nobody asked me about my report card. Mother didn’t remember about it until halfway through summer. “Hast du die Klasse bestanden?” *“Ja,” I said, “das Zeugnis bekomme ich im Herbst.” †Well, at least I would have some peace until then …

*

Did you pass third grade?

†

Yes, and I’ll get my report card in the fall.

MR. PERME had his model cruisers and destroyers out in the pond on maneuvers … That afternoon Hitler gave a speech. I heard his angry, piercing, percussive voice … the cheers … the fanfares … applause, as though all the hands were articulating bits of slogans in some big, probably beautiful assembly hall far away in Germany, all of it sensitively broadcast by that little box. The radio sat on the ledge of the landlord’s window and he and a few other refined gentlemen sat in the garden listening to it. When there was another round of applause and cheers, and you could hear them all getting up off their chairs (there had been 30,000 people assembled, according to reports the next day), one of the gentlemen in the garden said, “Here comes the ultimatum, the declaration of war. Now it’s France’s turn, or Poland’s …” War … tanks the color of leaves and dirt, airplanes, demolished houses, people tied up, like in the photos from Spain … meant the end of a beautiful life. It affected me even more when I considered that I had flunked the third grade … Of all the furious shouting I only understood a word here and there, even though the radio volume was turned all the way up, resounding as far as the woods on the far side of the lime pit … The voice contained that unusual boldness, when you needed to take just one more courageous step … the step that left you speechless in Tarzan movies or Popeye cartoons … fantastic, impossible, unpredictable … that lured you to that place where others could only shout terrified, “Stop!” “Dieser Feigling wird alle Leute in die Grausamkeit stürzen,” *mother said.

Clairi was spending days at home again, because it was summer and the tailors at the tables didn’t have enough work even for themselves. The Elite also furloughed Vati until the fall … He took everything he had out of his wicker basket … sleeves, collars, fur caps, short women’s vests, everything except for a big opossum hide, which he was keeping for really hard times … He put these items in a small suitcase and began walking around town trying to sell them … but he sold nothing. Someone gave him the address of the conference of St. Vincent de Paul, a philanthropic organization of the Church of the Sacred Heart, where we went to ask for groceries … The mother superior, who answered the door of the white building, sent us around the corner to the monastery’s public entrance where the sisters had their garden and kitchen. The entrance was next to a gasworks. The nun minding the entrance was tiny, old and nice. We were allowed to collect the uneaten bread that the St. Vincent’s nuns had left over from supper, emptying them out of the baskets on the long cellar tables into a paper bag. Mother would mix groats in with those crusts, producing an excellent dish. But we used up the five-kilo bag within two or three days … Hunger returned to our house … dropping its sticky, invisible net on us again. I was so hungry I couldn’t stand upright anymore … I went to lie down in the cool grass under the trees at the back of the garden. My head was spinning … I saw ghosts … and it seemed like the world came and looked at me: the trees assumed barky masks … the sharp grass … little white tears on the blades that kept dropping off … and the awning attached to the angled timbers over the door … I started shaking, so I went to lie in the sun, but then I got hot, so I retreated back into the shade … I was like a freezer or a blast furnace or a barometer … there was no way I could get rid of the painful oozing of saliva in my mouth, or the putrid stench belching up out of my guts and cramped stomach … The others, mother and Vati, lay in our tiny room so they wouldn’t move around too much and thus make themselves even hungrier … I went to check in on them twice … first out of amazement that they were lying together, and the second time in fear that they might have died. Their heads were leaned up against the headboard and their feet hung out over the end of the bed, and they were dozing or sleeping with their hands folded over their stomach … as though they were dead … I went out to the grass growing at the edge of the road to find ears of grain to chew on … tree bark and acorns in the woods were too bitter … The worst was that we didn’t have a single friend to help us … maybe if we had told somebody … Mrs. Gmeiner owed mother something, even though she had pawned the hides … She didn’t dare go to her house to ask for an extension, let alone another advance …