Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

*

You have to put this on and go to the German consulate the day after tomorrow.

†

Make sure you hide all that under your sweater or jacket.

‡

I don’t want to put it on and I’m not going anywhere.

§

You have to go there, or else the Hammans are going to throw us out of the house.

‖

You are the Hitler Youth, the future of our empire … You know that the peace-loving peoples of Germany and Russia are fighting against the plutocratic, imperalist aggressors — England and the United States … That’s why you must practice!

a

See what you can accomplish in winter when you have no weapoins and the enemy counterattacks. Shovel snow into the rivers and streams so that they swell and hold the enemy at bay.

b

He can’t win it. He’s a Slovene and his father’s a Slovene.

c

Doesn’t matter. His mother is German and he’s a member of the Hitler Youth …

ON CHRISTMAS Eve Gisela and I got toys and clothes from the German organization in town. Gisela got a sweater that smelled strongly of perfume and some other girl, along with a black doll made of celluloid with a grass skirt and a ring through her nose … really quite nicely made. I got a racket and shuttlecock and a red checked jacket, the kind that bad guys usually wore in the westerns … I put it on right over my shirt and when I went out that evening to look at the toys on display in the tobacco shop’s window, a policeman stopped and scrutinized me from the side. He thought I was planning to rob the store …

The victories of the German army around the world had begun to surround me with friends. My schoolmates became more polite. Those victories and defeats of some army in the distant world were like bingo, where you’d win or lose friends … It annoyed me that they surrounded me for things that smelled of far-off, noisy places that I’d never seen with my own eyes and where something was always exploding … I wanted to get rid of random friendships like that … I already knew how that went: warm today, cold tomorrow. It actually tickled me as I headed to school in the morning to see them crawl out of their houses so they could join me on the way up to Graben … As though I wore one of those uniforms with the ribbons … as though I were one of Rommel’s tank drivers or a Stuka pilot. “The English have got more tanks,” some kid named Bajec said to me. Now he was going to go on about the respective merits of German Tigers and British Churchills … Even Karel changed. All of a sudden he was at my heels more than ever, without my particularly asking him to go places with me … His mother invited me to their place for crepes with crushed walnuts. I sat at a round table at the back of their shop, which they closed over the noon hour, and ate with the whole family. Ivka smiled at me once. For the first time …

The Germans were already in Bulgaria, where the communists had once blown up a church … When Cvetković suddenly signed the Triple Pact in Berlin … That was news!.. People crowded Town Square, jostling this way and that, they were completely shaken … Mlekuž paced the hallways at school … his smock fluttering, his cane furiously banging … he spoke with the teachers, resting his bare head on the doorframe, haggard and quiet, as though he were looking into a hospital ward, not a classroom. You could feel it: Germany was coming … on a hundred thousand motorized wheels … black and horrible … Then one morning General Simovič defied the government … and seized power. They called it a putsch … Special one-page editions of the newspapers started coming out … The heir apparent Peter II had become King of Yugoslavia … He spoke on the radio. Suddenly, spontaneously, there were flags on every house and building … even way up on the peak of the Hammans’ roof, nobody knew who lived there … there were coats of arms in all the store windows, the heir apparent’s colors, his portrait … among all the eyeglass frames at the optician’s there was a big cut-out: the crown and scepter of the Karađorđević dynasty … the Oplenac church … When you turned away from a display window, the air was full of what everybody was exhaling. It swarmed with it … Defiance of that arrogant house painter with the little black mustache!.. Music, young people, old people marched densely entwined across Town Square and shouted, “Bolje rat, nego pakt!” … “Bolje grob, nego rob!” * … From the post office to the Triple Bridge students carried litters on their sholders that were covered with white flowers, in the midst of which stood, like the Mother of God in Brezje, a big color portrait of King Peter II in a glass-covered golden frame … still others carried on another scarlet litter the symbols of the king’s honor. Some shop windows had been transformed into creches depicting the life of the royal family … Peter, Tomislav, Andrej playing in a sandbox at Bled … The streetcars were festooned with ribbons, the policemen all wore the tricolor on their sleeves, and flags waved in front of Aleksandar I on his big horse in the Star Park … there was an indescribable excitement and bustle in all of the stores … the music pavilion of the Casino was all decked out in Yugoslav pennants … a vase of flowers was in every window, even the most ordinary and rundown … Great Britain and America were going to help us!.. If people were this genuinely excited, they also had to be noble … And if it didn’t matter anymore whether you were young or old, but everyone was equally young and old, then that made them even better and happier … I marched with my school past the post office … of course, everyone was looking at me askance … it was best if I just went away. The young, exultant faces, the flags leaned up against the display windows, the newly forged friendship of teachers and students, the general rejoicing put me into a stupor, a strange, unbearable sense of being divided … How were things going to be with mother and Vati now? I raced home and from home back out into the streets … Vati was standing at a window, pale and entirely beside himself. In 1914 he had hidden just like this in the attic of their green house while the Swiss Germans trashed his store downstairs, because they assumed he was a Serb … He had never thought that anything like what happened that day would ever happen again. He had left the Austro-Hungarian Empire when he was still young, and when he came back, he returned to the same places, but a different country. He was excited, defeated, speechless. He began splaying his feet even more when he walked and incessantly blinking behind his glasses. Was he glad or worried? And which one was predominant in his mind? I looked at him instead of asking, since that was the only way I could tell. If I’d asked him what he thought about all of this, he would have answered these were not matters for children. Or that everything that was happening was just froth, like on beer … Mother, of course, was afraid, and Clairi was shaking. “Der Hitler wird doch nicht aus Beleidigung die Stadt bombardieren?” †Mrs. Hamman was nowhere to be found. The shutters were down on her storefront … I was for king and country, but everyone around me was practically trying to stab me with their eyes … I was for the war that was coming, I didn’t like Hitler, but I wasn’t against the Germans … I would have preferred to change into a road that parades marched down, or a horse, or a tree on a hill … whatever, as long as it wasn’t a person. The air shimmered with people, as though it were burning … it was strange that the housetops didn’t ignite, that the tiles didn’t begin to slide off the roofs and the asphalt to boil …

On Palm Sunday I went with Gisela and her basket of Easter eggs and oranges to get them blessed at the St. James church. I thought everything would be as it had always been. Girls dressed in white with blue sashes, as I told Gisela. Bundles of willow branches and wicker baskets of fruit that people bring to get blessed. Then, a week later, the thing I always enjoyed attending most of all … the miracle at daybreak: “Christ is risen …” But it wasn’t like that at all. Miki, the son of the drunken painter, was waiting for me outside the door to his apartment. We had arranged to meet before mass. But then the siren started to blast. All of a sudden, way up high, almost pasted to the sky, the little crosses of airplanes appeared … A first flock. A second. A third.… Miki and I recognized them from the pictures on chocolate bar wrappers and from photos we’d seen … Heinkels, Junkers, Messerschmidts, famous airplanes … they roared steadily against the hazy sky … one squadron after the other … Their roar echoed inside the church like the buzz of the organ bellows … everybody looked up at the painted ceiling, from which the chandelier was swaying on its chain … at the windows that rattled, as though a worldwide deluge were pounding them. The sirens kept howling. Everyone stayed in the church … And at that precise moment the sky over Belgrade erupted … roaring and snapping everything from its place … people, trains, tanks, infants, Gypsies and grandmothers, then followed more airplanes, one squadron after the other. And all of these bundles of branches and baskets here, and us with them. It came as though clouds had just opened up, one after the other. Flames, bombs, new flocks and the extinguished volcanos of buildings coming to life again, crammed full of phosphorus … Boom! Boom! The suburbs left hanging from churches, train engines from bell towers …