Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

WE MUDDLED THROUGH the first half of August, that most beautiful month of the year, as best we could … I read to Gisela from the big little volume of Die schönen illustrierten Abenteuer (Wien 1933) that the old lady who lived over the cleaner’s had given me … It was really an exceptional artifact … the little one was intrigued by the princes and especially the princesses riding around in their coaches, attending dances at the royal court … Each story was richly illustrated … with everything, down to the last detail, before our eyes. I especially admired the drawings, then the colors … scarlet, green, pomegranate red, a knight’s armor with rubies … It was masterful work! The best picture of all was one in the middle of the volume … a mighty battle stretching its whole height and width. Two-humped camels, elephants, Knights Templar, heathens in desperate flight … Gisela picked some daisies and grass and strewed them all over the book.

Then beginning in the middle of August it started to rain for all it was worth and we couldn’t go anywhere … A number of things happened during those rainy days.

First, one afternoon a soaking wet gentleman from the St. Vincent’s conference knocked on our door … When we opened it, there he stood, tall, with a dark mustache, wearing a hat and a camel hair coat … so elegant we didn’t know what to do with him. He filled the whole room … taking all its light and air for himself … We grew afraid … was he the police, had he come for us? He held an over-stuffed briefcase and had a board wrapped up in brown paper under his arm … He set something down on the table and something else on the bed … “My name is Vladimir Kompare and I’m from the St. Vincent’s conference,” he said. “Your family has returned from living abroad?” I nodded, whatever he said. “In the name of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul I’ve brought you some beans and a devotional icon,” he said. His mouth made such strange shapes, like a boxer’s after a knockout — mostly twisted, causing his brushed mustache to shake.… But he had the same sort of bent nose as the Arab merchants or the barbarians at the bazaar in my book … He wiped the sweat and raindrops off his face … he must have had to walk very fast from the streetcar stop near Holy Cross … No, he hadn’t had to walk that far, on the road outside, next to the fence, was an old, rectangular car with a canvas roof … Targa-Florio 100 HP … So he was this wet from that short walk to the house … His briefcase was full of pieces of paper and newspaper clippings … he set a cloth bag down on the table … and an old, gray paper bag. He unwrapped the picture and threw the paper under the stove. “Where shall we hang it?” he asked. We didn’t have a single nail in the wall. “It will look nicest here over the bed,” he said. I looked for a tack for stretching skins and Vati’s pliers. He picked up the paper that he’d thrown under the stove and spread it over the bed. Then he climbed up … He had wide shoes, which were in style and looked like submarines … and he began to hammer the tack in. It didn’t take the first time, second time, not until the third … Then I handed him the picture, which had been printed on cardboard and put in a wide, shallow, brown frame with rounded corners. It was the first time I’d held a holy icon … on the back it was all scribbled with receipts, stamps and signatures … The man got back down and looked to see if it was hanging nicely … God knows I didn’t see him as a real person. His fancy hat and camel hair coat were completely mismatched with his distorted, fleshy afterthought of a face … If this wasn’t a disguise, then he was just strange. He took a document out of his stuffed briefcase. “Sign here. One kilogram of beans and one reproduction of the Mother of God.” Mother signed in Gothic script. Then he went to the Balohs to deliver the bag of flour. At that very moment they were kneeling around their stove, praying their rosaries … I went outside … through the small celluloid back window of his car I could see a whole stack of old cardboard pictures in wooden frames … “Ein komischer Kauz!” *Clairi said … “Die machen so eine blöde Reklame für das Kirchenamt,” †mother said. The beans were the main thing. But they were so old, gnarly, and tough that even after cooking them several times and gnawing and grinding at them like peach pits, they wouldn’t soften and we had to throw them away …

Second: suddenly, because we hadn’t paid him the rent for three months, Mr. Perme threw us out on the street. Clairi went up to talk to him, but halfway there she turned back. “Er ruft mich … ich müßte zu ihm hinauf kommen … ich weiß, was das bedeutet, ich gehe nicht,” ‡she told me, her face flushed red. I understood what the old man wanted from her … On the day when we were supposed to clear out of the room by evening, Clairi and I put some things in bundles and headed over to the sugar mill to ask if we could spend a few days under their roof. “So, jetzt sind wir ans Ende gelangen … nur die Armenanstalt bleibt uns übrig,” §Clairi whined the whole way there, making me cringe … First we had to go to city hall to get a document called a “poverty certificate.” I didn’t want to go upstairs with her and have to listen to her laments all over again … I stayed downstairs in the main courtyard entrance, among the cannon and mortars from World War I … The big, old Sugar Mill building was near the boat locks … it had at least a thousand dark windows … Its wide wooden stairs … where we met all different kinds of people carrying washbasins, cooking pots, baskets full of tomatoes and lettuce on their heads … were so worn down that they frayed under each additional footstep as if it were a pistol shot. First, at a window in the entryway, they registered us, then we proceeded to a big office where rows of little female officials worked — gray-haired ladies who handed us a ticket for three beds … The dormitory upstairs was a long, vaulted room with twenty iron cots, all of them nicely made up with bedding. I rather liked it … It reminded me of a hospital or the sanatorium in Urach … We set our bundles and hand baskets down on the first three reserved beds by the door, and then we went back to Jarše … That evening at six, when the deadline arrived that Mr. Perme had given us for clearing out of the room, we handed the key to Enrico’s mother to take upstairs, and we left … We went as though we weren’t going. Even though we were. It was like a tasteless joke … Suddenly it occurred to me that we had become unrecognizable, barely a memory, and that from now on we had nothing to be afraid of … and that nobody would find us ever again, not even Vati … I pulled my hood made out of a bag way down over my eyes to my chin … this is how death walked around in its monk’s habit at the time of the plague and in my vivid green picture … Mother and Clairi took turns carrying Gisela and one other bundle. At the St. Peter’s Bridge a raincloud suddenly burst which almost broke their umbrella and whisked it away … we were all soaked through in an instant, with fountains and rivulets gushing all around us … We weathered it out in a little park right under the the nose of the sugar mill … the boat lock was on the verge of exploding in the onrush of water … We went up the wide vaulted staircase. I knew which door … opened it: the dormitory was full of people … a regular circus ring … Some fat woman in a slip was brushing out her braids … three or four men, either idiots or beggars, were sitting on chests at the back in their long underwear … there were a lot of fruit vendors or Gypsy women along the wall … with green and red eyes … who were bathing a child in a wash basin as the water sloshed out. A strange world … never before seen … some sort of crazy picture … “Nein, da gehe ich nicht hinein!” mother said. “Und wenn ich auf der Stelle sterben müsse.” ‖She was as white as a sheet and shaking. “Nimm die Sachen! Wir gehen zurück!” aI was sleepy and my soaked clothing stuck to my skin … but worst of all were my shoes, which were full of water and threatening to float off of my feet … “Warum nicht?” bClairi stared at mother as though she were seeing her for the first time. “Nimm das Zeug, Bubi!..” cI picked up the two bundles and baskets that Clairi and I had set there and closed the door … I had no idea what to do next. We stood on the staircase landing for a few moments like statues … As alien to ourselves as strangers … The rain was pouring and streaming out of all of the big building’s gutters. We waited behind the half-opened doors of the wide entryway for the storm to dump all its rain and supersaturate everything … Gisela slept on the bundles, which we set in a cart fastened to the wall with a chain so fat it could have been used for a drawbridge. Mother sat the whole time without saying anything … “Gehen wir” dshe said. Clairi wailed, “Wie …” e“Ich habe die Fenster im Zimmer offen gelassen,” fmother said. It was a long way and we had to endure more on the way back than when we came down … We waited the weather out under a railway overpass with sooty bundles billowing through it … It wasn’t so much raining anymore as misting, but we were still soaked from before, we were shivering, and we were muddied up to the waist when we got to the vicinity of Jarše … It was as though we had suddenly returned to our former bodies, that we’d come back to life; but we were afraid. On St. Martin’s Road we stood in front of a deep, water-filled depression before we headed down the old path through the wheat fields … It was eleven thirty … We carefully pushed the iron gate open so it wouldn’t squeak in its hinges … we walked down the sand path on tip-toe … the windows really were open a crack … We pushed them open and one by one we stepped from the window ledge onto the sewing machine and from it down onto the floor … “Wir werden da hinter dem Bett schlafen,” gmother whispered. We stretched a rope from the stovepipe to a nail over the bed and hung a sheet over it so that the owner wouldn’t catch us first thing in the morning, we pulled the mattress off of the bed and made it up behind the sheet, from corner to corner … Quietly, very quietly, so that the Balohs, who liked to snoop around, wouldn’t hear us … against the wall by the stove, on the other side of which Enrico and his mother had their room, we could breathe and talk a bit more normally, because the two of them would never give us away … “Ich muß hinauf,” Clairi whined with resolve. “Wir können uns doch nicht so einschleichen und wohnen, wo wir doch nicht gezahlt haben.” hMother said nothing. “Schlaft jetzt,” ishe ordered. All four of us retreated behind the sheet, which let through the feeble light from the window like the screen in some cheap movie theater … I woke up late that next morning, the sun was already out … actually, Clairi woke me with a cup of warm milk in one hand and a fresh breakfast roll in the other. The sheet was gone from the rope. Was everything that had happened last night just a dream? I couldn’t believe that … “Wie denn das?…” jI asked. Clairi blushed deeply, then went pale, her lips quivering and her eyes misting over … She threw herself straight at me, past Gisela, who was still asleep … She hugged me so hard that I felt jabbed in the ribs … Her hug almost smothered me, and she smooshed me with kisses … I was suffocating … pushed her away … objected … shrank back. I didn’t want to shout, or old Mr. Perme would hear … I wriggled loose, but she latched onto me again … and everything started all over again … A regular avalanche of affection … I nearly broke my back under all her crazy kisses and hugs … My face turned into mush … I couldn’t find my nostrils … “Bubi! Bubi!” As though she were begging me … She began crying somewhere inside, from very deep down … She was completely beside herself … The old man upstairs was going to leap out of bed … Finally she calmed down a bit. “Iß nur!” she said. She must have done something. But what? Had she sold Vati’s opossum skin on the sly? Had she gone upstairs to Mr. Perme’s, to that room with the compasses? What had happened? Where was mother?… I wolfed down the milk and roll … and got more of each, in the same portions, while Clairi kept looking at me very nervously. Then I got yet a third breakfast, which left me lying knocked out …