Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

Bohorič was a desolate street, and would have been even if there had been anyone to do things with … In the ground-floor entrance of one little building there was a news stand and across the street a dry goods store, Bojadamič, where I went for five dekagrams of salt or sugar, which the lanky owner would chop off of a cone on the counter … Farther on, toward the far end of the street, there was a place in a courtyard that sold heating fuel, coal and wood by weight or pre-packaged in hundred-pound bags … and at the very end there was a bakery and across from it some tar-paper shacks inhabited by a motley rabble of jobless people and Gypsies and right behind the shacks was an apartment building with vaulted hallways all around that was called “Mexico” … At our end of Bohorič, across from the butcher shop, was a hospice. It had old people sitting around in its yard behind a fence … strange, goitered, half-crazy women, and men who would grin and froth at the mouth or spray spittle through the fence gate … Next to the hospice there was a stretch of grass with a few houses where I gathered dandelions … At the very end, which was already in Moste, there was a military hospital. That’s where I’d go with Vati, who went out of nostalgia for his army days, partly to save money, but partly because he was hungry for army bread, which he could buy from the sick soldiers out milling around, half a loaf of thick sourdough, enough to fill you up as much as two regular bakery loaves … You just had to bide your time next to the hospital, first until one of them who had bread on him came to the fence, and then until the sentry withdrew to his guardhouse on the main road …

When we bought the boxes, Vati also contacted a young woman who had put an ad in the paper saying that she wanted to apprentice to a furrier and was prepared to pay a modest amount for it. And so one day we got a visit from a young girl, quite small, dressed in a long sweater and with healthy, ruddy cheeks, as though she was just off the farm. That was a holiday for me … at last somebody was crossing our threshold from the outside, a stranger who was about to come to life in the midst of our eccentric home … We completely changed the way we behaved, especially Gisela, Vati and I, though not so much mother or Clairi. They complained and kept looking at her. I couldn’t understand that, considering what a ray of sunshine she was, this quiet, reserved young woman. Neither then nor later could I ever understand the animosity between women in situations like that.… There had once been some young ladies living with us at home in Basel, that both of them liked, and although they were pretty, I couldn’t stand them … Still waters, who knows what she’s got up her sleeve, they kept saying about this one … She didn’t have anything up her sleeve, you were scarcely even aware she was in the house. In the morning when she arrived she always seemed a little surprised, as though she were lost or had taken a wrong turn. Then she sat down on a metal dye cask that we covered with a blanket, because we didn’t have enough chairs … if you asked her anything, she’d be at a loss. She sewed the tiniest fur patches, veritable cobwebs, ruining her eyes … You could have confided anything to her and she would have kept it to herself. So suddenly we had a new girl sitting in the middle of our room and I had the unbearably wonderful feeling that we had a forest sprite in our house … I liked her tremendously and I also felt sorry for her. I knew that once Vati had taught her to sew, he wouldn’t be able to employ her, because he didn’t have a cent to his name to pay her with. It also concerned me that she could have learned a lot more from some other furrier in town who had a workshop and lots of equipment. After a week spent dealing with needles and furs the girl left us. She brought Gisela and me one cream cake each. She hugged Gisela good-bye and then me too. For a while I just lay — because she was still sitting on the tall cask — with my head in her lap, feeling her soft, gentle belly, in which there were two hearts beating … the one up above resounding through both palaces of her breasts, and that other, secret one that lay below her belly … like a clearing in the woods with the murmur of a stream emanating from it … Then came her hands, which covered my eyes. Even though they did smell of furs, her hands were pink from the sun that shone through her … Beginning that next Monday she no longer showed up and once again my burden pressed down on me, but with added weight …

*

Drink, drink, little brother, drink, leave behind your worries.

I WAS LEFT WITH just Peter and Andrej, who were too young for me to spend time with. I played with them both in the entryway, between the courtyard and the wooden barrier of the entry gate … We played marbles next to a tree that grew out of a concrete ring … the only leafy green thing in the vicinity … played hopscotch … dueled with sabers that I made on the Frenchman’s model. We talked, by now I already knew quite a few words … Peter and Andrej had been named for the king and his younger brother … They were for the Falcons, like their father, mother, and sister … the way all the more affluent people in Jarše were for the Falcons … The merchant across the street, Bojadamič, was also for the Falcons … You couldn’t separate falcons from gymnastics and nice houses … They were all gymnasts and all athletes were usually raw material … like perpetually running engines and race cars they dashed around mindlessly … one huge eruption of meaningless motion … of blissful, unthinking running. The Eagles came from poor houses … they smelled bad and they spread a sour stench like the Balohs, the smell of poverty … At home they got their hair shaved instead of cut, on account of the lice, and they smeared them with sulphur on account of scabies … They went to mass instead of gymnastics. They were stupid, submissive, and pious. Even though they kept betraying God and sinning against his commandments, they would then go repent on account of it … they never went too far … they betrayed their teachings and then they immediately went to confession … those big, dark, shiny cabinets that I was forbidden to enter because I hadn’t yet been confirmed … As for the Falcons, I didn’t know how far they went from gymnastics, parades and their nice houses … if they sinned, did they go straight back to their gyms or what?

Peter and Andrej were two tenacious cartridges filled up to their snotty little noses with Falconry … Their mother had Falcon outfits sewn for them that were appropriate for their age. Proper uniforms: red shirts with high collars … a jacket that had braided cords hanging from the left shoulder … a tall cap with a falcon feather … Two regular little Lilliputians that looked like they’d jumped out of their big brother’s pocket. Every day a funeral procession went down Bohorič Street toward Holy Cross at least once and occasionally several times … The black processions would turn off the little street that ran perpendicular to the Hams’s entry gate … They would drag on, bristling with heads … as many as there were dead people in the cemetery … First a policeman would appear in the intersection to stop the horse rigs, bicyclists, the occasional car … Judging from the policeman Peter and Andrej could quickly guess whether a Falcon or an Eagle had died. If the deceased was a red, they would stand on the sidewalk outside the gate, take off their caps and wait at attention for the tall black carriage drawn by two horses with plumes and the first small group of mourners to go past … if they determined from the constable that an Eagle had died, they went up to the fence and spat through the laths and the leaves onto the sidewalk, shouting “Boo! Hiss!” Because I felt sorry for dead people, I deliberately went out to stand on the sidewalk and quietly wait for the whole funeral procession to pass … not just the tall carriage with the little black angels in the patched pillars, but also the last couples, usually dressed in everyday street clothes, as they strolled here and there in the direction of Holy Cross … This was the cause of countless fights between the twins and me. “You’re an Owl! An Owl!” they railed at me … I wasn’t an Eagle … actually, I didn’t feel like I belonged to any group, which was the worst and most desolate feeling in the world … except that now and then I may have felt I belonged to God … or rather, to the conversations I had with him in the air around me, not that he ever answered or filled the emptiness with his presence …