Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

In the darkness we used matches to quickly inspect the apartment … From the veranda a glass door led up steps to a long, cold, high-ceilinged room where the red plaster was peeling … A bit farther on, under a vault, was the true, legal entrance to the apartment, a door with a window that was covered with waxed paper printed with roses … First was a dark hallway … the kitchen with a gas stove to the left, and on the right that big red room and next to it a spacious cave for the bathroom with no tub … Then there were two doors … between the first and the second was an antechamber with built-in cupboards … which led into the big room where we set our things down … Outside the windows there were cables, the trolley ran here … Each of the houses on the right and left sides of the square had at least one shop in it … This reminded me of the house I was born in on Elisabethplatz.

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Jews and Germans together! I would never have dreamed it could happen.

I SPENT THE FIRST FEW DAYS LEANING against the window … As a trolley went by, the wires tautened all down the street … On the other side there were shops: Zos’s for ready to wear and shoes with a little arcade in the middle … A delicatessen, a barber, a hairdresser, the Fischer grocery store with its cardboard parrot on the door … A tobacco shop and the Šmalc variety store with its corner of black marble … A goldsmith and watchmaker … A fur store, housed in a palazzo of mirror-like marble. The Shmied department store … Everything, from the doormats to the door handles, was elegant. The stores were all lined up one next to the other so that you didn’t so much walk as fly down the sidewalk … But nowhere was there a single patch of greenery or dirt for me to spit into. Day after day around here I was constantly going to have to wear nice clothes and well-polished shoes. All I had to do was remember the Sava, its gravel riverbed, the fields, the airport and my throat would constrict. When I leaned so far out over the ledge that I nearly fell, on the top edge of the “Hamman” shop sign I could see the pigeons padding back and forth over the letters and cocking their heads to the side to look up at me … This also reminded me of the Elisabethplatz in Basel, and the window where they used to carry me as a baby to look out at the street, the people, the children, and the pigeons on the window ledge. With all my horizontal weight I could sense that the raucous little creatures weren’t any danger … Now I was suddenly there again, looking out on a city square with its crush of stores, and the pigeons were once more keeping track of my behavior, as they had on Elisabeth Square. They looked at me appraisingly, as if assessing what and how many things were going to happen to me here in this new environment. I felt as though I were locked up in a classroom or a hospital ward … I made myself quieter and less obtrusive than the window panes, in order to make out from their cooing as many of the good and bad things that awaited me here as possible, and not miss any of their predictions, particularly not the bad ones … They would scatter at a loud noise, fly up over the wires and then perch on the windows opposite, so that I couldn’t make them out any more, or new ones would land, with other prophecies, warnings and news …

I didn’t dare go out in the street. There wasn’t any decent company for me out there that I could discern, anyway … I played with Gisela. We played telephone: I unwound a spool of twine, running it from the main room to the other, long, high-ceilinged one near the courtyard that had plaster crumbling off its walls. Shoe polish tins served as our speakers and receivers … I stretched a sheet out in the corner by the stove and made a tent for us that was so high and spacious that I could lead her around on her wagon under our big top, and still we were hidden from the adults. We played button store and staged a mass on the wicker chest. We also performed a play and various farces for the adults in the doorway to the antechamber. We dressed in mother’s clothes, put on Clairi’s shoes, adorned ourselves with chokers, fur hats and muffs, and painted our cheeks with rouge. Gisela participated in all of it with lively enthusiasm. We told funny stories, played pantomime, and tumbled all over each other … Gisela’s pale, little down-etched face and silky brown hair were made to order for the role of a princess … But gradually I got tired of these contrived entertainments …

At last I summoned some courage and went out to stand in front of our glass apartment door. It had been pasted over with waxed paper that had a checked pattern with red roses. Just like the distinguished doors of affluent residents! There was a small space outside the door. The vaulted exit led on one side to the courtyard veranda, and on the other it led up a polished stairway to the apartment of the mysterious Mrs. Hamman … Sometimes we ran into her … A big, powerful woman with charcoal eyes and black, wavy hair. With something rigid inside her … She would stop in the middle of the stairway under the vault and shout orders back upstairs … to her cook or her maid in German and Slovene … At times she was accompanied by a businessman in a black necktie and green hat, occasionally even by two of them, who wore the same kind of ties and green hats and almost had to run to keep up with her … One time it would look like the lady was following their lead, and the next as though they were obeying her … There was no way of making that out … I always managed to do a sort of double double-take whenever I saw her. The first on account of her beauty and elegant clothing and capes flapping behind her, and the second at the resolve and nonchalance that she showed to the world … I didn’t know whether to greet her with “Good morning, ma’am” or “Grüß Gott, gnädige Frau.” So I greeted her with a bow. Once she bowed buoyantly back at me, but mostly she just hurried on out of the house, her jaw clenched tight.

Here, at the short end of the courtyard veranda, was also where the nice old lady lived, her mother, who had given me a copy of Die schönen illustrierten Abenteuer a year before. What wouldn’t I have given to be able to have another look at those guns engraved with the years of manufacture, or the collections of sabers and shields on her wall … and run my hands over those objects from noble times that I could only fantasize about … One day I ran into her just as she was airing some rugs out on the veranda, each of them bearing its own noble coat of arms … She was standing beside them, leaning on her cane and smoking out of a long mouthpiece. Her white-haired head, refined face, hooplike bracelet reminiscent of cells in a castle dungeon … and the cane with its beak-like silver handle on which she was leaning … all of it literally etched itself into me … It brought to life for me images of palaces atop cliffs in olden days … even those times of the rich past in which Vati, mother, Clairi and Margrit had lived and which for me were only a fairy tale, like everything that had been in the world before I was born … I said hello to her with all the awe that informed me … humbly, placing my hand on my heart, the way real esquires showed respect to their ladies … Oh, how I hoped she would one day invite me into her chambers …! She greeted me back with a strong, goodhearted nod, which sufficed for the moment, as her good will enfolded me like a veil beneath which I would either perish or take flight …

The veranda ran all around the rectangular courtyard, above which the trees of castle hill inclined, their bushy crowns and powerful trunks descending from the castle onto Hamman’s Dry Cleaning, Pressing and Alterations like a primeval forest … Through the long glass pane of the workroom, only the bottom half of which was frosted, I could see the laundresses, seamstresses and female assistants, all wearing caps and white work smocks. Sometimes they sang in chorus, as if up in a choir loft … Beneath its glass roof the veranda would squeak and rattle noisily whenever anyone walked on it, and the girls would lift their heads and look out over the frosted glass to see who was there. If it was me, I turned red as a beet and took off like a madman … A glass-enclosed porch hung like a basket on the wall at a right angle to the veranda. Various gentlemen and ladies would walk around and take their seats in armchairs inside it. They had eyes that they used to observe the courtyard, although they were different from the knobby eyes of the workwomen … Thus there was no refuge for me on the veranda, because you could never be alone and completely free there …