Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

The next one who joined us was Marko, who lived over a shoe store near me on Town Square. He was a little kid with such gentle eyes framed by a pale face that they were really, as books used to say, reminiscent of violets … something unreal, like out of a fairy tale … He brought along his little sister Tončka, who was four years older than Gisela, chubby, with tiny eyes that would melt away behind her high, puffy cheeks. When she decided she wanted a toy watch like the one she saw on Gisela’s wrist, I gave her the other one that I’d stolen from Velikonja … Marko’s family tended a goat in the woodshed behind their house. The boy once brought it along on a rope and it proceeded to graze around the lindens and the wall. We hitched it to the Prinčičes’ hand wagon, which we loaded with rocks. That’s when the idea of a battle wagon came to me that we could use in our attacks.

Firant came from the prettiest house on Jail Lane. He was a nervous, volatile boy like me. Right from the start something like fear, mystery, attraction, repulsion and pleasure reigned between us, as between two opponents facing each other in the front line of battle. Friendship was not possible. I was aggressive and so was he. The very way he walked and held himself was like an attack. He would drag one leg behind him, glance up at you with his head bent down, clench his fists. His otherwise collapsed face had a big mouth and a bony, jutting jaw, like gangsters in comic strips. The first thing he did when he joined us at the wall was to call me a German and challenge me to a fight. He wanted to know which of us was stronger. I wanted to find out, too. After a few initial feints we had each other by the shoulders. He won because, it seemed to me, he had reserves of some hidden, vicious strength. And also because he was fierce. In the second round I pinned him to the ground. He looked around angrily, with lots of white showing in his sunken eyes. The third round was a draw. The thing that got on my nerves most about him were his lower front teeth, his incisors, which stood out from the others and caused him to lisp … I felt like knocking them, along with his jaw, back into his gullet. In spite of it all, he invited me over to his house, where his father worked as a women’s tailor. We walked up the artfully winding stairs, where there was a potted palm on every window ledge … all the way to the top, to the attic over the fifth floor. For me this was one more proof that annoying people always lived in the nicest surroundings. His father, who was constantly beating Drago with his belt, was a powerful, tough, curly haired fellow who looked like a priest in civilian clothes, while his mother was tiny, just skin and bones. There were colorful rags and swatches lying all over the kitchen floor that muffled your footsteps. Firant had his bed in the kitchen in a sort of alcove right next to his parents’ bedroom door … At night he sometimes heard what his mother and father were doing in their bedroom, moaning and making the bed squeak as they fucked. He talked about it so calmly that it amazed me, but then again not. He opened the door and showed it to me. In the middle of the room was a big double bed that in my imagination ever since then has stood for continual lust and delight. Next to the bed was a bassinet with an infant bawling in it, his little brother. My God, how he must have enjoyed hearing all that right next to him. He described it to me in detail … Then one time next to the cart he solemnly promised us that he would take us all there some Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon to listen and watch through the keyhole as the two of them, Davorin and Pepca, his parents, did it in their bedroom … But despite all this directness he was quite sneaky. You could sense how pumped full of deviousness he was and you could practically feel it leaking out of his mouth like hot air. You had to be careful around him, because he was always resentful about something and balling his fists. You also had to be pretty dumb if you decided to go look at heaven with him …

Then, lastly, we were joined by good-looking Andrej from the most dilapidated house on Jail Lane. Without exception all of us recognized how exceptionally handsome he was. A thin, refined, pale face, small, dark, velvety eyes, and such a small mouth that you couldn’t imagine how he could shove an ordinary spoon in there. What’s more, he always spoke out of the corner of his mouth … almost inaudibly, as if sipping each word … Upstairs in the attic of the courtyard building where he lived with his mother and half-sister in one room, he had an open hallway that got narrower and narrower on account of some big supports, where he hung out whenever he was home alone. In the hallway there was a pantry and a stove with a long pipe attached to the gutter. His half-sister Neva was a strong, homely young woman who did temporary work as a salesgirl in various stores … his mother, dark-haired with lively eyes, like him, loved singing love arias from operas, popular songs, chansons and hits from musicals. She lived on the pension that she had from her first husband. She knew how to tell every story she’d ever heard, she smoked like a chimney and was forever reading suspense novels that she checked out from the St. Jacob’s library … Here on this rooftop, she once told us, was where the cops chased after Hace, the famous burglar who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. The police climbed up on fire ladders to put him in handcuffs, but he just slid down a gutter downspout and lightning rod and escaped … with a whole bagful of watches and rings … I was excited. I couldn’t look enough at the ridge of that roof and the fat chimney from behind which he was said to have taunted the cops. Now that was a bandit! A real Robin Hood!.. Now and then Andrej’s mother and Neva would give me something to eat … their asparagus strudel was especially good … In the mezzanine next to them there was a tiny room where a young whore lived. Andrej’s family had some sort of rights to the room, because they kept their wardrobe and two crates there … Andrej told us how he sometimes looked through the keyhole when she had callers inside. She would dance around in a little ballerina dress, sometimes exposing her breasts. The men would do push-ups on top of her and then throw some money into a basin on the table. Whenever she made too much noise, his mother went after her with a coal shovel. He had even gone after her with a broom once, punishment had to be meted out!.. He showed me her little room. It was like a monastic cell. There was a picture of Mary on top of a cask. Once, he told me, he and I were going to hide in the wardrobe and watch what the little whore did from close up, because the girl didn’t lock her door, she would just fasten a hook on it … and sometimes not even that … the room would gape open all day long so you could go in and out like a breeze …

All six of us together now made for quite a powerful group, even though you couldn’t count on most of them … Marko was too delicate, Franci too much of a wimp, Firant too sneaky, Andrej too handsome to fight without holding anything back, and Ivan too excitable and dimwitted. I just wasn’t sure about Karel. Nobody really had him figured out. Was he brave?… Of all of them I was most attached to the two of them … possibly because our parents did similar work, both families had workshops at home and all three of us constantly had to cut, fold, dampen, crawl on the floor looking for needles, and clean … and we were always decked out with every conceivable thread, yarn, fur, and ribbon … But what mattered was that there were enough of us now that we could attack the Breg dwellers, who were constantly violating our borders on the bridge … Perhaps we were already strong enough to declare war on Žabjak and Trnovo, but for sure we could prevent other armies from making incursions on the embankment … Up in the old castle, for instance, there was a motley rabble living in the semi-dilapidated rooms that were propped up with beams. It was led by Sandi, the scourge of delinquents, who had already been under arrest for robbing an alms box in the cathedral … If we could just organize our defenses like they did! They had a habit of lurking in the tree branches that jutted over the path and then leaping down on miscreants’ necks like Robin Hood’s merry men. It was in one such attack from above that they jabbed a pocketknife into one kid’s neck … If they caught one of their attackers, their practice was to tie him up to a tree trunk upside down and then take everything that fell out of his pockets … Knights! Then they kicked him from the battlement walk all the way down to Streliška Street at the bottom … Some of their sisters were also part of their gang, and they were nasty, wild, combative girls … They wouldn’t even let grown-ups into the castle, they chased everyone away … nannies with children, school classes that went up with their teachers to have a look at Ljubljana, they sent all of them running …