Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

*

This is really superb, masterful work.

†

Don’t look there, you little guttersnipe!

‡

Throw the candy away.

§

Do it!

‖

My poor little guy!

a

All lawyers! They have mountains of money.

b

Won’t you come back next Thursday evening, hmmm?

c

Did you see that, Bubi? Such arm muscles when he was sitting, and then … What a runt! And yet, how intelligent and wealthy, how striking he was!.. But what did the little creep mean when he invited me to come back next Thursday evening?… Oh, he’d better get that notion out of his head. Not in my wildest dreams … But there is something very refined about him, don’t you think?

d

I’m a schoolteacher.

e

Perhaps your brother will come take my class sometime?

f

Now that was a nice lady!

g

Bubi, there are really so many decent people in the world, it’s just a shame we can’t find out who they are sooner.

h

What a pig!

i

You can skip all that, dear.

j

… within the thick walls of my house.

k

Come see me again sometime.

l

Beautiful Illustrated Adventures

ON FRIDAYS Mirko’s mother from the wagon in the gravel pit would put on her worst rags and set out from home carrying a handbasket to go begging. The boy had to go with her, no matter how much he resisted … Friday was beggars’ day and when they came home at noon, they brought all kinds of things with them … once in a while, even toys, whistles, mirrors, broken harmonicas … Once they gave me an arrow with a rubber tip … Mirko tried to get me to go with them and even his mother tried to persuade me, claiming that Mirko got bored without company … One Friday we set out together. And then several times after that … His mother didn’t paint her lips like she did at home. She put on a worn-out skirt that you could see all of Jarše through, and a blouse she had darned, she tied a blue apron around her waist and covered her head with a black kerchief down to the eyes so that she looked like a penitent … We went barefoot in single file. His mother’s hips swayed just over the cornflowers and poppies as we crossed a field … with each gust of wind her big rear end bulged in her skirt like an enormous onion … What might await us in town I had no way of imagining … Now, with nothing in hand, to get something, anything at all? But you could squeeze something out of a number of stores … even some that sold toys … if nothing else, a paper cap with advertising on it, sometimes a balloon or at least a catalog with color pictures … The selection was wide and the city well-supplied with surprises. We weren’t allowed to ring our bells outside the buildings that had blue metal signs over the door that said the owner contributed to the foundation for the poor of the municipality of Ljubljana. But we could outside stores and workshops … On the sidewalk approaching the Dragon Bridge, where we were ringing our bells, a woman looked at us through a half-opened door … her eyes, when she noticed us, suggested that we were worse than the trash cans on the sidewalk. “Don’t you even know how to read?” she asked acidly. And indeed, under the house number there was a blue metal sign. How had Mirko’s mother missed that? The woman slammed her door shut and for a moment I lost faith in Mirko’s mother’s expertise. “I just thought we’d give it a shot,” she shrugged, laughing … The Šarabon department store across from the hospital was the most tolerant of beggars … you just had to hurry so that the other cadgers didn’t beat you to it … the tavern drunks, the morons and idiots from the municipal poor houses, who knew the city’s more charitable hearts well. You had to be there the minute the shutters over their doors got rolled up … The big store was the shape of the letter L. We went in and said what Mirko’s mother had taught us to say, “In God’s name, please give a beggar some alms …” I was supposed to go to the checkout window, she went to the grocery counter and Mirko went around the corner where some interesting housewares were sold … Those were the orders his mother had given us. That way one of us might get something, she said, or maybe two, possibly even all three, but there was no way, if there were three of us, that none of us would get anything … I stood in front of the tall pane of the cashier’s window and it took me a while to twist my lips into a kind of snail. “In kots nehm bleez …” “Huh? What did you say?” the cashier asked, who had a dreary face framed in a permanent, like schoolteachers. Either I’d said nothing or she hadn’t understood me. How on earth was I supposed to get anything off of these well-stocked shelves, display windows and drawers up to the ceiling … with nothing at all, just for some words … after all, this wasn’t Childermas, where kids got to cane presents out of adults … Easier than talking would be just to snatch a candy or a packet of vanilla powder … I stepped back a pace from the glassed cabin when the cashier called me. “Are you with them?” she asked. “Yeees,” I nodded. “Here, you can have this …” I couldn’t believe it. The kind woman pushed a 25-para coin out through the gap onto the rubber mat on my side of the window … Outside Mirko’s mother got angry with me. I didn’t say a word. “You have to say nicely: in God’s name please give a beggar some alms. Then you bow your head and wait …” She put the money in her apron … and everything else … a small tube of toothpaste, some shoe polish, a lollipop, and a little metal frog in the hand-basket … At a bakery Mirko and I had to stand next to her, as though we were both her sons. The baker looked at all three of us and grabbed some pieces of yesterday’s bread lying in the corner of an empty shelf, and mother tucked them into her bag. “May God reward you,” she said … At the dry goods store it was all about money, because they wouldn’t give you enough material for a handkerchief, or at most a couple of buttons … at the delicatessen, amid the mountains of ham and cheese you might get a salami … and a broken pretzel, a box of matches or a thimbleful of brandy for her at a restaurant … Out on St. Peter’s Road we ran into others who were coming to beg … revolting little women all carrying empty, bag-like baskets … a tall, skinny man with a violin case … he at least played the fiddle for alms … Mother pushed us to get moving … she had a few kind souls on this street … a barber, a watchmaker, a dairy attendant. She couldn’t afford to have the others beating her there … We sprinted and went under the noses of some old women through the open door of the barbershop, in among the glinting mirrors and barbers dressed all in white. Now it got easier, because she told us to just say hello nicely when we went in and then stay close to her without saying a word … At Mayer and Sons, where they had gigantic carpets lying on the floor, the sly-faced salesmen, all of them dressed in nice, gray suits, chased us out the door, waving their hands … At Krišper’s they had nothing but toys in the basement … train sets, dolls, musical tops, racing cars, tanks, boxes of tin soldiers. Mirko and I looked over them while she was upstairs in Housewares … Each of us got a small notebook with a red cover from the lady who sold picture postcards … “It’ll be ten soon,” mother said. At ten all begging had to stop. Not until late afternoon, from five o’clock until the Ave Maria could beggars come out and beg again. We still had the market ahead of us, you could always get something there, if not from the vendors, then out of the baskets and crates of refuse … Mother took off her black headscarf when we reached the Kolin factory on the way home … The play was over, no more mardi gras … The walk home to the gravel pit was hurried and impatient … Mother unfastened the padlock on the wagon and shook everything we had got out of the basket onto her bunk, which was at the far end of the wagon. Between it and the other end, where there were pickaxes, shovels, and clothes, there was a shelf of pots, a kettle with a lid, a quite decent stove and Mirko’s bunk … I didn’t get much, most of it stayed with them, and almost no money … but that wasn’t so important. More important than the tiny stacks of change and the colorful junk on the bedcover was the fact that the woman then sat down cross-legged on the bed, so that I could see up her white thighs … Or when some item escaped from the little piles and rolled into a crack or a wrinkle in a sheet and then, as she went looking for it crouched with her knees on the bed, her breasts hung down like a beaver’s, their tips touching a pillow … I felt feverish at the thought of being able to see and do even more … all I had to do was take hold of her skirt and I’d have her over my head, just touch her blouse and kerplump! her breasts would fall out … just tug on her a bit and she would shake like a pear tree … I left the wagon all dizzy, envying Mirko for the fact that he could be alone with her. I couldn’t believe that she was his mother and he was really her son …