Lojze Kovačič - Newcomers

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Better war than a treaty! Better death than a slave! (

Serbo-Croatian

)

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Surely Hitler isn’t going to bomb the city out of resentment?

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A few more days, then it’s all over! (

Serbo-Croatian

, then

German

)

TOWN SQUARE FILLED UP WITH SOLDIERS of a different sort … wearing dark green riding breeches and strange horn-shaped caps … a jeep with a German crew and a dusty motorcycle with a side-car were parked outside city hall … The monument to King Peter I had been covered from head to toe with an Italian flag … and up on the Castle a red, white and green flag with a crown and the crest of Savoy fluttered, like the flag from some fairy tale involving princes … People, mostly men and boys, were gathering around the German patrol … Of all of them the officer was the most attractive … covered with dust, young, restrained … People were straining to think of some word in German to say, which struck me as childish but also moved me … The patrol was happy to show them their weapons … machine guns, grenades, and bazookas, which they had whole stacks of right at their feet, next to the steering wheel … They explained how to shoot them, from the shoulder, but before that, how you fit one ring into the next to make the weapon lethal … “What decent people!.. One of the soldiers slept at my house last night … In the morning when he shaved, he didn’t leave the razor blade on the window ledge, no!.. he wrapped it up in newspaper and took it out to the toilet in the courtyard …” some slightly daft old man explained to the crowd … In Maribor the tanks and motorized units were welcomed with flowers, flags and music … Even Hitler paid a visit. Pale, the collar of his leather coat turned up, in an army car. Then from the balcony of the city hall he announced that they were going to make Slovenia German again … Many people thought that the Germans were going to come to Ljubljana too. In Lower Carniola peasants carried a sign that read “Da ist das deutsche Reich” *from village to village … almost into Croatia … Everyone wanted to live under the Great Reich … nobody wanted the spaghetti eaters. The Italians delivered flags by truck from street to street … Mrs. Hamman, who had distributed German flags and ordered them to be hung from every window, was crushed. Her two gentlemen looked rather grim too. Her house was one of the few in a long row of houses that didn’t bask in the sweetshop colors of the Italian flag, instead she put out the deadly serious red flag with its black twin gallows in a white circle … the banner of attack, discipline, war, and death … the four-footed cross that turned like a screw, crushing everything in its path … I had a vague sense that a certain distinction existed in this friendship between Italians and Germans … I understood differences in friendships well and I felt sorry for the Germans, because they’d probably been tricked … Italian martial music filled Town Square, reaching all the way to the monument to Napoleon and the Casino. They played “Giovinezza” … The drum major tossed his baton with its silver knob as high as the second stories of the buildings … People stood on both sides, laughing, clapping, pleasantly surprised … Elegant Italian officers and their wives went shopping in the stores … Civilians wearing foppish outfits, with handkerchiefs in their coat pockets, strolled in groups of two and three. These were detectives, questurini … The soldiers wearing black shirts and caps with tassels were from Mussolini’s division of Arditi … The uniforms of the Honved officers were odd: instead of buttons they had wooden wedges and on their shirt fronts across from them loops, and they wore square caps with feathers. The carabinieri wore Napoleonic hats … The Germans in their close-fitting uniforms that looked like they’d been poured into them were the only ones that resembled real warriors … In a serious city that was full of books and learned people, the Italian soldiers seemed more like clowns … What they cared about was the women. They bowed right and left and outside the shops they would tip their hats … “Che bella biondina!..” “Che bella signorina!..” They blew kisses from their trucks so intently that sometimes they even fell out of them … They would stop groups of girls on the street and strut around them in their baggy riding breeches, one looking like Stan, the other like Ollie … The girls liked it … they laughed at the Italians … they hadn’t seen soldiers like these ever in their lives … they would retreat from them walking backwards and laughing so hard that they soaked themselves with their tears … Around town … in courtyard gateways, on corners, in stores you could hear various foreign languages being spoken … a regular Babel, like Basel … The whole world descended on Ljubljana … That buoyed my spirits and I felt relieved … People, antique dealers, porters on Jail Street, women, the Prinčičes’ mother, Andrej’s, Asipi the bootblack … stared, admired, and talked on sidewalks up close or shouted across streets to foreigners wearing a variety of uniforms. The city changed into a different kind of emporium, a different kind of capital … Portraits of King Victor Emmanuel and the Duce wearing a helmet appeared in the shop windows. There was new money in circulation, too, lire. But the bread that we bought from the baker on Jail Street, that was worthless. Like boiled flour, burnt corn. A loaf of it would disintegrate along its furrow. And when you brought it home all you had left in the bag were sticky lumps of mush …

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This is the German Reich.