Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

I told nothing to anyone about these adventures … not to Karel or Ivan or anyone else, because I was afraid I would lose their friendship instantly …

Finally, one day we set out to visit the Franciscans. Ivan had arranged it for us. Downstairs in the basement of the rectory there was a big room with a stage where among other things they put on puppet shows. Comedies involving Punch and Judy … First we prayed for peace on earth. Then father Chrysostomos, a short, fat, kindly priest, who was the editor of the youth magazine The Little Light , read us some of his poems. Some of them were playful and others were quite pious. I sat as if glued to my chair. This was the first time I’d seen a poet. I couldn’t believe that such a corpulent man, who was a real monk dressed in sandals and a brown Capuchin habit, could compose published poems. He certainly had to have something that wasn’t visible on him anywhere and that also made him so outwardly kind that we didn’t have to be afraid of him … Then we watched some silent religious and documentary films that the father put on the projector himself. These included a film about Lourdes, about the sick people who descended on the healing waters there in droves, about Bernadette’s house and the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes … then there was a movie about an agricultural school in Norway and two young people, a boy and a girl enrolled there. The most interesting thing was that they didn’t carry a briefcase to school, but just took their books tied with a strap. We could have carried our school things tied up in a bundle like that, too … Then the young people boarded a train and found a place to sit on the platform of the last car … They looked at each other the whole time and laughed as the snow-white fjords moved by between their noses … At one point, however, when they glanced at each other and their faces suddenly drew close … probably so they could kiss … father Chrysostomos put his hand over the lens and the screen went dark. “Awww!” everyone moaned. When he took his hand away, the train was already far away … just a dot on the horizon … After the show father Chrysostomos promised us that we would soon become crusaders. He had his warehouse in a small room next to the stage. The costumes lay rolled up into balls, and though they’d been washed, they hadn’t been pressed … There were no proper trousers for me and even the ones that fit were ripped at the thighs … There weren’t enough spears and he was also short of plumed hats … No one had everything, except for the older crusaders who had taken their costumes home with them the year before … By Corpus Christi, the priest promised, we would have everything on hand and could participate in the procession. In the meantime we were supposed to ask our mothers at home if they would patch and press the trousers. By Corpus Christi there still wasn’t anything … so we had to march in the procession deficient, some bareheaded and others without a spear, following behind those who had the complete outfit …

Now it was also high time for us to attack the Castle … War was in the air. We collected suitable stones for our slingshots, sharp arrowheads that we put in an empty road worker’s box that lay unused among the carts … We had target practice using bottles … The day before the attack I went to reconnoiter. Carefully, without a single stone in my pocket … first contact with the enemy should be like a first loving caress … On the hillside above the path that a street sign called the Path Past the Fences I noticed a kind of trench, a meter-deep hole dug in the ground, covered with branches and surrounded with stakes strung with thorn bush branches … A guardpost, a sharpshooter’s nest, the enemy’s front line … The next day around lunchtime we headed uphill, as if we were going on a field trip … The bunker in the hillside looked like a bush from a distance. We crawled up to it on our bellies … as though the girl we were in love with had fallen asleep in a ditch. There was nobody in it … We yanked out the stakes and threw the branches aside … Well look here, they had some sort of piggy banks made out of bean cans, but there was nothing inside them, they were empty … Then it struck me: they had meant to string noisy tripwires of tin cans around their trench, like the English had done on Crete, so that any paratroopers approaching their fortress would set off a clatter … We continued uphill on the paved road toward Osoje. From here on the castle gang had their eyes everywhere, behind every bush, every tree … I said that we should all pretend like we were gathering bouquets of wildflowers … for science class, for our botany teacher … Then an inner tube that Franci, that klutz, was concealing slipped out from under his shirt and trousers … clunk!.. right onto the middle of the wide road. That was the alarm signal! Even the gabbiest of gabby people could have noticed that with the unaided eye … We hadn’t yet reached the foot of the ramparts when I saw Sandi in his red shirt running down the tree-lined path out of the castle … Two or three others, including Škerjanc and a girl, were racing behind him … “Slingshots!” We had to hold them back. Plink! Plink! the poor little pebbles went flying. We only stopped them for a moment, during which they looked around … then they headed downhill through a ditch, behind some trees and through the grass toward the path … By then Franci had already turned around … he was running down from Osoje and dropping everything along the way … the inner tube, his saber, the stones out of his pockets … Behind me I still had Ivan, Firant, Karel, Marko … Andrej a little farther to the rear … The castle gang were already lying in the grass, testing their slingshots … we had to get down on the ground and shoot our rocks from there, aim at the boards we suspected they were hiding behind … Then all of a sudden, as if out of nowhere, a watchman wearing a green cap came running out of the ramparts … waving a stick. “It is forbidden to walk on the grass!” Was he the father or an uncle of one of the castle gang? This broke all the rules! He was threatening just us with his cane, but not even looking at them … cop justice!.. We had to withdraw from the grass onto the path, onto the gravel, while the castle gang could stay in the grass, he still wasn’t paying any attention to them, as though they weren’t there. The jerk! Just then Škerjanc’s brother leapt out of the grass at me … at least he had the same kind of nose and shaved head as Škerjanc … I grazed his shoulder with the inner tube … “Attack! Attack srough ze grass!” I shouted. When I looked back, Ivan wasn’t breathing down my neck anymore, he was running away … and a bit farther on I could make out Firant, Marko, Andrej, Karel. So he was a coward after all! The thought filled me with pleasure … and for a moment it was as though I was free again! So now I was all on my own. This was going to be a regular fight of a canary in its cage! I had to decide! I had to attack! I began to shout. Only hot air came out of my mouth … I threw a whole thing of stones at Sandi and the others lying in the grass, of whom all I could make out was an ear or a forehead here and there … I had to take the offensive … My skin was taut with anger, taut to bursting, like a drum skin, so that any blows would only have made dull thuds and nothing else. I charged straight ahead through the grass, throwing stones … I changed into the victor, because now I wasn’t the one who had done wrong … They were in shock … that’s what I counted on … I darted past their shoulders, legs, and heads as quick as a breeze … Hop! and in a single leap I was on top of the ditch, right in the middle of their unconquerable boulevard where they staged their parades!.. At least I’d done that! They got up, shouted … “Get him!..” I saw reinforcements running down the tree-lined path … a second group, the one that always guarded both points of access to the castle from the market, the shorter path and the longer one … they always thought of everything!.. I had to get down via the path that went past the ramparts, that led through the woods to Karlovški Bridge … The stones began to crumble to dust. I saw the red shirt amongst the rabble. I dashed off toward a turn beneath the wooded slope. “Go around! Catch him at the chapel!..” If they caught me, they were going to take my pants off, this I knew. That was a lot worse than getting beaten up, it was psychological pain … not anger, but sadness would dull all physical torment … I didn’t have a single breath left in my lungs. I looked over my shoulder: sky and red shirt. Around the turn. Yet another turn. A double turn like a snake wound up in a coil. I flung myself over the edge of the road down the hillside. Thump! Smack! What sound does a head make when it slams into a tree?! Down, down!.. I rolled past trees, through ferns, bushes and undergrowth, all speckled and spongy, my arms and legs smacking against the trunks of trees … The wall along Streliška … there was no end in sight to it, I could barely make out a gap in it over the orphanage … Some gentleman dressed in a cloak and a velvet hat was standing in the middle of the road holding a flower … The soup kitchen was just about here … I was furious. That damned, cowardly gang! I may have been a hero … but I had also turned tail … All scratched up, I limped to the riverfront to confront them … Of course not a single one of them was anywhere to be found … they’d all hidden, each one for himself …