Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

Maybe these ones crammed into the train car weren’t yet the real ones. The real ones lived in houses, had stores and horses and all kinds of machines.

*

Have we already crossed the border?

†

Yes, we’re in Yugoslavia now.

‡

What did you say?

§

What are you talking about?

‖

Where we can eat and sleep cheaply.

WHEN WE GOT OFF THE TRAIN they didn’t even give me enough time to look up at the sky and catch my breath … There was a gray, illuminated, covered passageway on the platform with a few people … and beyond it was pitch darkness all the way to the sky. The air was warm, dry and a bit oily, with a fine mist slowly drizzling … We set our luggage down on the stone floor of the illuminated passageway … It was quiet, extremely quiet. The passageway didn’t have any interesting posters or different-colored light bulbs, just iron pillars curved at the bottom and top … Some people were standing around at the far end or were walking back and forth … many of them in black trousers and white shirts, with hats on their heads … Nobody spoke … laughed … or waved … There were a few dark-skinned women with scarves on their heads and men’s shoes on their feet … just one woman, running across the tracks in the distance, was dressed in cheery, colorful clothes like the women in Basel … but she vanished among the trains … The people were milling around as if waiting, looking around, especially at us, although they moved as though they were slightly crippled … They had umbrellas as big as the one on the train … I couldn’t believe that we had arrived here so quickly and that I was still awake in the middle of the night … maybe because we were so tired and sleepy, someone had tricked us and we’d been directed to the wrong place … and now we were who knows where … It was a shame I couldn’t see the sky and a shame it wasn’t daytime so I could find out whether all of this was just some prank … Vati was in a conversation with some short, stocky, swarthy man. He was speaking to him in his language that felt as soft as pastry … was he asking him something? This man, too, instead of listening to Vati, looked him square in the face, and then answered him the same way … straight in the eyes, the mouth, the nose … in a voice that resounded way up toward the ceiling. Was he a woman, perhaps?

There were so many people in shirtsleeves jostling in the enormous, poorly lit waiting room with ticket windows and bars over them!.. And such a big clock hanging way up on the wall, as white as a moon that had escaped indoors … but it was still outlined with those big, disgusting numbers from the first grade arithmetic workbook …

Outside there was a street with trees that ran parallel to the train tracks, but everything else lay in darkness. It was monotonous and dreary, like some side street.

“Kommt, ich werde euch etwas zeigen,” *said Vati. “Laß die Kinder in Ruhe, wir gehen schlafen.” † … Vati took me assiduously by the arm in a way he’d never done before, and we proceeded to walk the length of the gray station building. From around a dark building on the other side of the street it got lighter and lighter. “Schau nur!” ‡he said. All at once, in the middle of the black sky, there appeared a dazzling glass castle. So that was it!..

“Ein Schloß aus Glas,” §I said. So this really was it now. The light permeated my skin, coat and hair, touching me like a ghost. I had no sense that any of my family were anywhere nearby.

“Wie schön,” ‖mother said behind me, holding Gisela, now awake in her arms. There, you see, now even she admitted that something was beautiful. The light made us as visible as though it were day, it saturated the sidewalk and transfixed us like the sight of a Christmas tree … The glass castle had a tower and a long main building. No windows were visible. It hung in a cloud … did it float like the moon? What kept it up there? Was there just air between it and the city? I didn’t want to risk asking questions, or they might drag me away. Even my buttons, the anchor, my whole blue navy coat from Basel was saturated with this topaz-yellow light, as though it were changing. The street that we saw the glass palace through seemed wrapped in a flannel darkness, between its tall buildings there were lamps that shone in a line going all the way down … It was impossible to do anything but just stand and stare.

We had to go back to our stack of suitcases and take them across the road and some streetcar tracks. The front door of a tall, dark building was open and lit in the very middle of the night. A gentleman wearing a striped waistcoat was standing behind a desk, with numerous keys hanging on the wall behind him. Vati spoke to him and the gentleman spoke back to Vati in that language that even here, in this building, among chairs and tables, refused to stop being dreamlike … We got a key with a big wooden pear attached to it. Some other man helped us carry our suitcases as we went up the red carpet covering the stairs. We went all the way to the top, bumping into some wood-paneled walls on the landings, and then turned left where there were even more stairs that appeared to have no end. In the corner of some hallway next to a small table a door opened. It was a room, not very deep, with white covered beds and a divan … a mirror and a cute washbasin. The white castle shone through the window. I wanted to sleep on the divan next to the window. They grudgingly moved it for me. Vati and mother lay down on the double bed with Gisela between them. When they put out the light, the castle shone gently into the room at the same height as my pillow. I crouched there looking at it and at mother, who saw my head against the pane, and quietly tried to persuade me to lie down …

In the morning … the pillow under my head smelled funny … and I jumped when I suddenly woke up … Out the window, in the place where the white castle had shone the night before … there was an old building resembling an ugly, brown ruin with a square, crumbling tower and holes in a sort of stone crown jabbing into the cloud cover above it. I couldn’t believe my eyes … But maybe, I quickly recovered, the glass castle is invisible in the daytime, because it’s transparent … The brownish-gray jagged wall with its square tower stood atop a forested hill … above the reddish cupola of a church and the tin roof of the hotel courtyard that had been soaked black in a downpour … It refused to be erased so that I could see the glass walls of the resplendent castle from the previous night … Or maybe the earth moves so fast that the glass palace is already appearing to people on the other side of the world.

I called out to Vati when his eyebrows began to move. I told him that the castle was no longer made out of glass, that it had turned to stone. He jumped out of bed in his long linen skivvies and nightshirt and leaned over my shoulder at the window. I was expecting something to happen when his eyes made contact with the demolished castle … but it stayed the same. “Weisch, es its abends nur beleuchtet,” ahe said.

I didn’t feel like reminding him that yesterday when I’d said the castle was made out of glass, he hadn’t corrected me.

“So hast du dir das nur vorgestellt.” b

“Es war aus Glas.” c

Then mother spoke up. “Shhh! Bleibt still, daß die Gisela nicht erwacht.” dI told her what had happened. “Schon gut, das war nur die elektrische Beleuchtung.” e

Vati hopped back into bed, because his feet were cold … but really so he could sleep some more!.. How was this possible? They’d fooled me again, if not lied outright. There was nothing outside, and here in this room with them everything was the way it had always been, broken and rancid for the millionth time. I flung myself back down and closed my eyes. I could hear father as he shaved. He was standing at the sink in front of the mirror, tugging — tsht, tsht — the razor across his face. Admittedly, this was the first time I’d ever seen him shave, but the brownish gray castle with the strange tower stayed the same.