Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

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The little bric-a-brac table in the middle, a beautiful Louis XV item.

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God bloody dammit!

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Those Catholic clerical pigs!

VATI WENT EVERY DAY to read the Morning and the Slovene on the bulletin board across from the baker’s where they got posted … After school he would send me to read the afternoon edition and the Slovene Nation . I was supposed to read just what he specifically told me to read: the war … foreign affairs … the want ads, the for sale ads … the prices. I couldn’t always find everything or understand it … There were too many maps and headlines, especially on the first few pages, which were full of exclamation and question marks … I liked reading the captions under the photos best. An armored division in Spain, where fat General Franco in that silly army cap had won … little Japanese tanks somewhere far away, on the other side of the world in Manchuria, where rice grew with snakes all around … a complex roller device that Hitler’s bomber pilots were using to learn to hit their targets more accurately … One day toward the end of August there were a lot of people crowding around the bulletin board … a dark thicket, in trench coats, shirtsleeves, caps, holding ice cream cones … I stood at the back, unable to see anything through a layer of people reading that was ten feet thick … They were standing so close together, leg to leg, pocket to pocket, that I couldn’t squeeze through them … This had to be big news, because everyone came away with faces that looked like what they’d just read was some sort of food they were still trying to swallow … From the end of the fence I began to move toward the start of the bulletin board … from the last page of the newspaper toward the first … They wouldn’t let me get near it … they were leaning into the board with their arms … their heads dangling over the front page like pears, as glue continued to drip thickly off the board from under the newsprint like honey … Finally I shoved my way past the front edge to the row of pages … and was greeted by a lot of grumbling, they wanted to chase me off to the children’s corner … A picture showed Hitler and that other scary man. The one with the low forehead and the fringe-like hair from the caricatures, who led the Jews and the communists, Stalin. NON-AGGRESSION PACT BETWEEN THIRD REICH AND SOVIET UNION … A photo showed German foreign minister von Ribbentrop in a uniform and Mongol-faced Russian minister Molotov in a black suit … “Has Europe been divided into spheres of influence?” it said … At the bottom of the page was a picture that showed Hitler in his short mustache and Stalin in his bushy one, each grabbing from either side parts of a jigsaw puzzle labeled “Poland” … Vati was so surprised when I told him about the pact that he dropped everything and ran outside in his house robe to look at the bulletin board … He came back looking confused. “Juden und Deutsche zusammen! Im Traum hätte ich das nicht geglaubt …” *The tavern on Bohorič buzzed like a beehive … Everyone was buying newspapers … crowding around radios … talking in clusters on the sidewalks … trench coats fluttering at the street corners … Two superpowers had united … Now it was Poland’s turn!.. What response would England and France have? Chamberlain and Marshal Pétain?… And America? Roosevelt?… I knew we were going to move soon. That worried me a lot more. To Town Square, the house of Mrs. Hamman … into a big apartment … there in the center of town Vati’s fur business was going to prosper a lot more. They coached me for it … from now on I was going to have to work harder and be a lot better behaved … Or else they would put me in a reformatory, and that sort of education — oh boy! — that was like being in the army … for every infraction the schoolmasters beat you with a belt … they had already got me transferred to my new school, Graben … There at the very least I was going to have to earn Bs, not like now when my report card showed nothing but Cs … I had already asked around about the man who was going to be my new teacher, named Mlekuž. A strict, unbending man! He would have what it took to tame children …

Then, after the big news that had struck everyone like an axe to the head, the newspaper wrote: Blitzkrieg … Germany attacks Poland … A photo showed Polish cavalry consisting of white-clad horsemen with lances attacking German tanks … Bombardments. Stukas. Two pursuit aircraft flying over Warsaw … The Germans dismantling a border crossing … Germany gained 190,000 square kilometers, the Soviet Union 180,000 … of Poland … Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, but they didn’t help Poland … Vati and I went to Šiška to sell furs to a merchant who had a house near a train crossing … His pink round house with columns and a grocery store on the ground floor stood on a corner … upstairs the merchant had his nice home: a big living room with oil paintings in frames. While Vati and he were talking, his son Oto and I played tag all through the house … up and down the steps that wound like a snail shell … outside in their yard, with bags and crates lying around … among the columns that we designated as home … Nobody scolded us, nobody shouted … Oto walked into the store … bottles of champagne, fish, foie gras in mayonnaise lined up on the shelves and in the display cases … He took a tall jar of chocolate candies off of a shelf and gave me a whole handful … the saleswomen stood by with their hands behind their backs and didn’t even say “boo” … It was immediately apparent that, when his father wasn’t around, Oto represented the owner here … That’s how I would have liked to live … have a well-stocked grocery store several paces away where I could go whenever I felt like it and take whatever I wanted … The merchant was still a young man and serious. “What had to happen has happened,” he said to Vati. He pointed down to his courtyard where the bags and crates were. “Now at least for a while my people need to keep their mouths shut …”

We moved after ten p.m. when the streetcars ran less frequently and there were no gawkers out in the street to make fun of our meager worldly possessions … So long, faucet and old witch! So long, Mrs. Guček! Tobacconist lady!.. Goodbye, Jože! Mr. Ham! Zdravko!.. We moved using a cart that Mrs. Hamman had loaned us … the tables, the hammocks, the chairs, the wicker chest, the boxes, the sewing machine, the bunches of patterns, the box with pots and eating utensils … We had accumulated quite a bit … We had to make three trips there and back … Carrying our clothes, bedsheets and Gisela, Clairi and mother walked on the sidewalk behind Vati and me as we pushed the cart … When we arrived in the vaulted entryway of the wide house, which had a glass-enclosed porch framed in white-painted wood as part of its facade, and began to carry our things up the dark staircase and then down the long, squeaky courtyard veranda protected by a glass roof and metal poles (there in the corner was where old Mrs. Hamman lived), through a vestibule into a big, empty room with two windows that faced out onto Town Square, from which a streetlight cast a dim glow onto the dark parquet floor, where we set each item carefully down, to avoid hurting our hands, but also so they wouldn’t drop and wake up the people who lived in the house … I remembered similar moves that we’d made in Basel … from the green house in Gerbergässli to the ruin that we lived in in Steinenvorstadt, from there to the Rue de Bourg alongside an arcade you could take to get to the Rhine … from there to beautiful rue Helder with its fountain in the middle of the road, and then from there to the square near the Mission school and finally back to the green house in Gerbergässli …