Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

Mr. Marok also taught handicrafts … basket weaving using different colored papers, sawing little shelves, crocheting. Drawing was hardest for me. Marok drew a ship on the blackboard, a big pot with holes for the cabins. I drew a similar one, only I added everything I’d seen on steamboats on the Rhine: in addition to the smokestacks and railings I drew signal masts, little flags, the captain’s bridge, and all around the boat swarms of tugboats and freighters like little bacilli … My bench neighbor, Bajželj, had drawn a steamship in perspective … with its prow raised and its stern low as it sailed on the horizon … Pot-bellied Marok came padding over in his slippery suit and kohlrabi sweater … he was excited about Bajželj’s drawing on account of its perspective … this was something … he pinned it up to the board as an example for everyone … Bajželj got an A and I got a C. It didn’t help to do what they said, or be disobedient … I had no head for other things … I calculated everything wrong on the abacus … my language assignments teemed with mistakes.… my handwriting was all smudged and I could barely read … Rote answers to questions while standing in front of the class … would have to be heard to be believed … It was torture to pronounce each word … they were like little stone cubes that it took all my effort to push out of my mouth with my tongue … out of my throat, the corners and hollow of my mouth … There wasn’t much I could do with them, least of all express myself … I couldn’t like anyone, get mad or laugh at a joke with them. All the words were wrapped in thorns or compressed into balls of tangled threads … there was no way to take hold of them or turn them around, much less disentangle them … It just wouldn’t work! It was a mystery … One of my schoolmates named Robert also lived on Bohorič. He was a pale, blond boy. It was strange that I hadn’t become aware of him before. His father was a train engineer … Once he invited me over to their house. They had a big, bright kitchen with four windows on two sides, with every possible dish simmering and sizzling on a big range … His mother was a pretty, freckled lady whose red hair and little green apron suited her perfectly … I sat on a painted cabbage box and watched as, kneeling beside him, she tried to feed my colleague beef soup with light groat dumplings one spoon at a time. The boy refused and his pretty mother had to beg him with each spoonful. A spoonful for daddy, a spoonful for grandma, and on and on … I couldn’t believe it! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been like that … maybe in Basel or when I was in the hospital, but even then I must have been hopeless with asthma … His mother served me with hearty pastries, which were golden inside like her fine skin, and had a brownish crust like the little roof over the secret little house that she hid under her heart-shaped apron. Between Robert’s mother and the atmosphere filling that prosperous white kitchen, I had enough scents and colors to keep me satisfied for a full month.

At home they were now allowing me my own tiny place at the table to do my homework. I felt a resistance to numbers … to the arithmetical symbols + — ×: themselves … I would furrow my brow when they looked at me from the page, because that’s how one thought … you couldn’t just lure your brain out with limesticks … My resistance to school got stuck on them like some little toad. I didn’t have the slightest inclination to illuminate the darkness inside my head like some castle hall. It would have made my head hurt … There was nobody I could ask for help with anything — not mother, not Vati, not Clairi … They didn’t understand the rules of arithmetic, much less of grammar … I jotted down an equation and answer based foremost on how elegant they looked. For the answers I would choose numbers that didn’t appear in the equation above or, if they did, I would change their sequence. It developed into a kind of drawing. I scribbled out the writing and grammar assignments hastily, from the topmost to the bottommost letter in my notebook I could see my hand moving deftly and with childish ignorance as I wrote them … as though it were playing in sand. One day I’ll master these things the way I breathe … without any agony. I would have preferred not to have anything more to do with these notebooks, erasers, and pen holders, even though big, fat, juicy ones with tails on them, the kind only Marok knew how to draw, kept glaring at me from out of my notebooks … In the morning before classes some of my schoolmates would hastily copy the star students’ homework. I could see fat Marok going from bench to bench, reading them and assigning good grades, without those knuckleheaded cheats having to lift an eyebrow. That was cheap, tricking Marok, because he was ugly enough as it was and all he had in the world was his beautiful voice … My backpack began to stink of classrooms and benchs, as though I were lugging the whole school home … I threw it into the farthest corner. That was enough for one day! I wanted to have some peace in the afternoons … I went out and looked at what few interesting things there were on our street. At least that was something, even though I still didn’t have any friends …

*

Listen, how can you be so bad at school when you’ve got such a bright little head on your shoulders? And lie, to boot? And destroy an important official document?

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You’re going to mess up your life … They’re going to put you in a reform school or even in prison.

ZDRAVKO ALL BUT DISAPPEARED for a time and sickly Robert was always out on errands with his mother. He needed a lot of air … I was left with Gisela, the twins, or the old monkeys over behind the hospice’s fence. I couldn’t understand how a person could become so old and decrepit and still feel like living. Particularly in as messy a yard as that. If only the old folks were at least a little bit nice. But sometimes their eyes would start glinting as though a whole madhouse had just opened up in their heads. They also sang now and then, sometimes in the middle of the night, like monks … I could hear them through the wall. They didn’t have bad voices.

Finally I gave myself a kick and headed over to the barracks. I climbed up the fence and looked in. What utter poverty! The wooden shacks were as shabby as those plague-eaten horses in the pictures of my illustrations … Heaps of rusted metal, pipes, strips, and sheets … And what wasn’t strewn around the gate … motorcycle tires, holy icons, horse collar padding … But they had piglets in pens, with chickens pecking around, and rabbits in warrens … There was a brilliant sign on the fence: “Cunt and prick make little Dick,” next to which there was a picture of something like poop dropping into a potty … A few boys with bowl haircuts came out accompanied by girls. I wasn’t afraid of them … they seemed to be shyer than I was. I particularly liked one of the girls. She was wearing a skirt that probably belonged to her mother, because it reached to the ground. Her ass almost bounced like a ball. Dark hair. With a little ring on her tanned hand … They invited me to come on over the wall … Lots of interesting wrenches lying around heaps of old metal, some of which would have made fine brass knuckles. And cleaning rods like arrows. Unusual package-like parts of machines. And fat rubber bands for slingshots and tanks that you could make out of spindles. Sheets of aluminum. Glass liquor bottles … I kept close to my Gypsy girl. She let me know that she liked me. She was like Adrijana and Anka rolled into one … We scaled a few little fences and in an empty, abandoned pigpen with high walls we kissed each other on the dry cinders; she put her tongue in my mouth … she stroked my balls so hard, with both hands, the way the little Gypsy girls in Cegelnica begged for a dinar, and I stroked her cherry with its little groove. Her little sisters and brothers exploded with laughter. They made fun of our caresses by rubbing themselves between the legs and kissing the air with big, puffed-up cheeks, as if in some big movie … When I came back the next day, firmly resolved to see our nastiness to its end, my girlfriend was gone … she had moved … It was always like that: either I moved or others did.