*Your two uncles who live in America.
†My mother when she died.
‡I thought it was a sponge cake.
§Your uncle wants you to ride down to the river with Ivan and Ciril.
‖Down! Get him down from there!
LANGUAGE, one that you don’t understand, can be pleasant now and then … It’s like a kind of fog in your head … It’s nice, there’s truly nothing better … It’s wonderful when words haven’t yet separated from dreams … But not always … I could examine everything as though I was in a theater … Before a storm the sky would get dark. The rain splashed as though a whole sea hung in the air … The Krka flowed like a roadway from hell … the water rose to the machine with the bucket … a whole wagon, a haystack, half a hayrack, a small forest … once even an ox gasping for air and lowing … floated past quickly and slammed into the banks of the river … You lost your voice from the wetness, your sight from the gloom, your soul from the lightning … And then silence again. The great kingdom of fog!… It was as though everything was under a spell … a different world … You couldn’t see two paces ahead of you in Karel’s meadow … The house hung in a cloud, the fog tamely expanding into the entryway, slowly pressing into the dark kitchen, into our yellow room, between Gisela and mother, who was refitting dresses for Minka, Mica, Stanka … between the cows and the pigs in the barn … Mooing and cooing and crowing filled the space … Especially sounds from the river below … It seemed as if the water reached to our window … We could hear it on the other side of the house, where just a plum and an apple tree stood … The steam engine’s whistle expanded in serpentines through its foggy soot to the sky … A land of ghosts. You had to go back into the house right away. So you wouldn’t topple into the Krka down by the bucket … But on peaceful days red clouds floated back up above the horizon over the water and the fields became blue … A whole parade of people … women, men, children … each with a hoe in hand, wearing hats, scarves, and colorful woolen caps, like the ones babies wear, would be digging out in the fields … tossing the useless potatoes onto the gravel … calling out to each other across the fields. A ladder wagon came racing along and stopped, causing its horses to rear up on their hind legs … With that guillotine of his on a tall handle, the plough, Karel pushed through the meadow … Everything that had been down below got turned up … The meadow exposed its whole lower layer to the world, to the sun and the air, so that the huge green space by the train tracks looked something like an African’s gigantic shining face. No one had ever seen anything like it. Ever. It was a miracle, a sin, something like the Indian wars, the first casualties … with not a sidewalk, a bit of asphalt, a roadway to be seen … you kneaded the cool, pleasantly damp, greasy lumps barefoot, till at the end of a row, next to the ploughshares and the basket-like carts, you were spattered with dirt on your chest, back and face … like the Sioux in their warpaint … Then all the way back, and then once more all over again to repeat the pleasure of having your legs sink into the dirt up to your knees … Mother in her white dress smiled at me from the far end of the field and Vati, as always, rested his hands on his back and was nervously blinking behind his glasses …
DURING THE FIRST WEEK we went down into town. To the authorities to take care of some paperwork. Both uncles wearing black suits and hats. In tall black shoes that laced up high. With no stockings. They wrapped rags around their feet. “Leggings,” Aunt Mica said. I couldn’t repeat it … I went with one of the uncles and Vati went with the other. Karel entertained Ciril and Ivan with much laughter … they were very similar. All three of them had black, fringe-like hair and brown eyes, but only Karel had sideburns. Each of them had a big mouth. And the same way of shoving his hat back on his head. “Go join them!” Karel said and I ran over to Uncle Jožef, who was talking to Vati and laughing with Anka, his youngest … I ought to have been staying at Karel’s side, not running to Jožef. They were revealing their teeth and gums … this was wholehearted laughter … which I could understand even in a foreign language … The houses reached down toward the water, like animals going to drink … Along the way there was a smithy, with the smith outside just then, nailing shoes onto a black horse. “Unser weiter Verwandter,”* said Vati … For a while we watched the black horse – lithe, glistening, a regular racer with his head tied to a timber – put up with all the hammering on his hooves … The nails that broke got pulled out with pliars. Uncle and Vati had a short chat with the smith. He didn’t look strong enough to me for that kind of work. I couldn’t understand anyone. Maybe the bellows, the fire under the hood. But when the smith’s assistant began to strike the white-hot shoe with his hammer, even that clinkity-clink-clink sounded like a word from their language … Other than that, my ears just hurt from the noise, but still … Even Liska was mooing like the braune and schwarzbunte Kühe† on the slopes around Urach … But this “moo” coming from her funnel-like muzzle was not the same “moo.” Maybe Liska wasn’t even a proper cow … She went walking straight into the house, announcing herself in the kitchen. As fat as poor Mrs. Dopf from the flower shop next door on Gerbergässli in Basel, she stood between the table and the hearth in the fringe-like coat and horns of an outwardly clumsy cow. I felt sorry for her … Now I could take her by the horns fearlessly and lead her out. I could stick my hand in her mouth and let her lick it … There were no “Tannenbäume” in this forest. These pines grew tall and resinous, with sharp needles and lots of gaps … they were some completely different species of tree … A completely new one! Exotic! Straight out of my imagination, although I could touch them … a species thoroughly mixed up by the chaos that language causes. I had to give it a new name … who knows, maybe half in my language, half in theirs … derived from the impression the pine made on me … “mast tree,” “umbrella tree,” “monk tree” … Even the spoon I ate with wasn’t a proper utensil … but some object of driftwood and steel that would jab at the corners of my mouth as though it didn’t know what it had been made for … It would try to pry my jaws open … pulverize my teeth, smash my tongue. And the skinny, white and brown cat that introduced itself one morning with its magical mewing in the gutter … And then the Krka! It was a dangerous thing that flowed with its crocodilian surface as though it were flowing past us straight out of hell. It wasn’t the Rhine, which was wide and had ships sailing on it … it was meant only for drowned people, cattle, house roofs, forests and hay-wagons … It could be quiet, gurgle, swell, subside, be peaceful, ugly or beautiful, but always as though under its mists it wore some sort of mask. I wouldn’t have been afraid to wade into it … I tried from the laundry stones, since the inlet where livestock were watered wasn’t really the Krka. But Vati grabbed me under the arm. And yet I wouldn’t have dared … because it was and it wasn’t real water. Were my eyes deceiving me or something?… One morning by the pear tree outside my window I saw Ciril and Ivan, who as usual had come to get me to go with them to water the animals. They stood facing each other … each holding a sharpened stick pointed at the other, trying to gouge him in the eyes. “Sie werden sich die Augen ausstechen!”‡ I shouted and ran to get mother. Mother shouted and ran to get Vati. Then Vati to get Karel. Karel waved dismissively and turned away. For him that was a game. “Sie spielen nur. Du hast das nicht richtig verstanden,”§ Vati said. I had misunderstood? I shouted, “Ich habe es gesehen! Ich habe es verstanden!”‖ I knew I had seen it as it was there to be seen. Then again I wasn’t completely convinced … Karel went to talk to my cousins. They were offended and sulked angrily after that. Had I seen right or falsely accused them?
We reached the little railroad station where we had arrived several weeks before. There were train cars standing there. Big, red ones. Tenders, as they were called. But for me they were circus paintings on a big canvas, cars made of red chewing gum … When we went down into town, the buildings scattered around amid the stones of the paved town square, which was full of sewage puddles, horse droppings, cow pies, haycarts and pigpens, were just
country buildings. Not city buildings at all, these were tiny and quiet and you could practically see through them. The town hall was a building with a tower, but it was lifeless, without any guard houses or police cars in front. The little shops here had dirty windows, half-blind rummage stores. I was no longer interested in produce stores as I’d been in Basel … with whole mountains of oranges and valleys of spinach on little bleachers … but the bakery, instead, with its sesame and poppy buns and loaves of white bread. The barbershop with its white-clad barbers, wigs and bottles in the display window full of scents and ointments, none of which had any trace of earthy dirtiness, mud or the unpleasantness of nature … The pharmacy with its medicines in jars and gold bust of the first doctor in ancient Greece … The general store. Its display window had bottles and glasses full of unwrapped candies and a stack of small, faded chocolate bars in dismal, monochromatic wrappers. That was the clearest possible proof that everything had really changed … that it was all just a pale reflection …
I was learning the language. My cousins Ciril and Ivan, and occasionally Stanka, too, taught me the song “Little Sunshine on Little Mountains” … They pointed to the soft blue peak that rose up over the black forest on the far side of the Krka. Those were the “bountains.” Atop them lived a shepherd who got married to a skinny girl, who was all bones when she hugged him, a fat girl, who melted on him, and a very short girl, who got lost in his bed. All of them resembled various peasant women, young or old, whom you could see walking around the village. But most of all they resembled the crazy woman from the cabin, who was all of these things at once … she had a big rear end, skinny legs and she was short … The worst thing was when Vati went looking for work in town and he wasn’t at home. When I went out and said, “gut mornink! gott villink! gut day!” my cousins would laugh. This wasn’t a pleasant laughter, I noticed that right away … It shook them so hard that they practically bounced up to the roof. “Zerspringt nur, kleine Mistviehe,”a I thought to myself. They ran into the house to get reinforcements for their laughter … Aunt Mica or Karel. If one of them so much as touches me, I’ll lose it … Two weeks, three weeks, five weeks went by … I wasn’t going to let them trick me, no way! I wasn’t yet capable of having a conversation … All I had to do was remember Ivan and Ciril’s sharpened sticks … the endless arguments between mother and Vati, every possible gossip and threat … all the mischief they could inflict on you with a word … and it passed. I was fully prepared. They weren’t going to get me to walk into their trap … I had a unique opportunity to keep quiet … to hide in a way. They thought I was sulking. Let them think that! In fact, I was unable to speak … Karel dug a big, deep pit near the cross to hide food. I helped him send foodstuffs down on a pulley. A barrel of cabbage. A crate of apples. A case of meat. A box of flour. A tin of lard. He laid straw and boards over all of it. “Krieg! Krieg!”b he repeated, “There’s going to be a war!” he said, encouraging me. “Zers koink to pea a vor!” I repeated. I turned around in the pit to face Ciril and made a sign on my forehead that meant “he’s nuts” … I ran off as fast as I could. But that afternoon I was already tending Liska at the far end of the pasture. I could see mother and uncle in the doorway of Karel’s short house – her wearing white, him in black. It would have been impossible to imagine two more remote opposites. I knew they were never going to be able to understand each other … From morning to night mother would only lament. And she would cry, which made me feel sorry for her. “Ich fühle mich so wie in einem Kerker”c she kept repeating. On Sunday we rode in Jožef’s black and yellow carriage with the lanterns to Prečna for mass. When I got up I had to get a good wash using the bucket next to the well … Only Vati didn’t go with us, because he didn’t believe in God. And Aunt Mica on account of her legs. Each of us was supposed to pray an extra Our Father for her. The carriage was full of my female cousins decked out in their Sunday best. Bright-colored dresses, loose blouses, pink satin. I was allowed to sit on the driver’s box next to Jožef. He was nicer than Karel, probably because we didn’t live at his place. Once long ago Vati had sent some money for the church bell in Prečna. I was proud as it rang now and echoed through the hills, fields and forest … Its white walls rose high up over the people, and the church had just two ordinary windows without colored figures … The peasants sat dressed in black, baggy suits, the very best of their wardrobes … their heads and faces poking up out of them like dirt, and their lips were chapped. God wasn’t a silver-haired St. Nicholas … He sat on a cloud with a triangle behind his head and a geometrical nose … On Sundays Stanka was prettier than usual … Children had to stand at the rear … My lips practically touched the bronzed back of her neck as she sat in the pew … The temptation was great … Her hands as she prayed were beautiful, exquisitely bronzed … they had the same maturity as her face. Like something out of a fairy tale. The charm that passed over her face as she pronounced the words of the prayers, the way her nose twitched and her lips moved … It was pure witchcraft. It flooded me. I heard angels singing. Her slightest smile sent out waves … a pure magical force. I didn’t dare look at her anymore … And her hair, as the candles got lit. Black, violet blue! Damn! She was becoming a water sprite! Right here, for all to see. I looked around, but no one had noticed … But I also knew she could be mean … like Gritli … From that time we were mowing on the slopes above Kandija, when we played tag and she hit me with a bridle supposedly just in fun, but in fact swung it as hard as she could … Up above, on a kind of stove in the middle of the chuch, stood the priest, dressed in white … whenever the organ came in, the women would start singing like waves of thin voices. Banners hung from shiny metal poles … with saints, temples, St. John the Baptist with his shepherd’s staff on them. This was a different kind of God from the one I was used to. A peasant! A mower! A sower and driver!…
At that time Vati went to look for work in the biggest town, Ljubljana, where we had first arrived … Whenever he was away, we were alone. And that wasn’t good … Uncle Karel gave mother one less tablespoon of lard. She had to ask him specially for flour and potatoes. He forbade her to sew for my cousins: none of those girls was going to wear her city rags. “Niks schneiderei! Arbeiten!”d he said. She had to chop up a whole mountain of carrots and turnips. I stood at the block and used a mallet – a block on a stick – to mix, crush, and strain the feed for the young piglets. Clunk! Clunk! Aunt Mica came out. “Barrel!” she said. “Carrots!… Pigs!” Her red pustular face bunched up into cute wrinkles. Encouragingly. And if only she had been God knows how much nicer!… “You pig! Your mother pig!…” I understood. And I almost slipped, but I managed to get a grip on myself. I just had to remember everything … recognize the words, that was the key, and pick your own fights … I opened my mouth … wide, I looked like something was about to come out … But nothing came …
*A distant relative of ours.
†Brown and black variegated cows.
‡They’re going to poke each other’s eyes out!
§They’re just playing. You misunderstood.
‖I saw it! I understood!
aGo ahead and blow up, ya bloody animals.
bWar! War!
cI feel like I’m in a dungeon
dNo seamstress! Work!
WE HARVESTED GRAIN on Jože’s field and bound it in sheaves … Vati worked in town at a branch of the Elite company … He sewed sleeves into ready-to-wear jackets … He would leave for work in the pre-dawn darkness and come home in the late-evening gloom … In exchange for flour and lard mother sewed a nicer dress for my cousin Minka, who was supposed to have gotten a job at the post office … She was a stout woman. Her round face radiated good will. She reminded me of Claire. She walked back and forth in the kitchen in her rustling bright silken dress and tight blouse with billowy pink satin sleeves … Aunt Mica, who was mixing dough for bread, turned around from the hearth. She said something with an ominous look on her face. “Was sagt denn diese Schlitzäugige wieder?”* mother asked. I looked
at my aunt. Her eyes weren’t slanted, they were as bright as pebbles. “Etwas über die Messe … daß sie mit diesem Kleid nicht zur Kirche gehen kann …”† I answered.
A yellow dust rose up over Jože’s field that pricked at your skin and burned your eyes … An ox tied to a stake walked in circles over the grain, so that its hooves would thresh the grain out of the husks. A regular merry-go-round. The post he was hitched to would creak. He walked in a circle for kilometers on end. That’s how bread was made. No other way. It was obvious the ox would succumb, so they switched him out with a horse and then the horse with the ox again. On the floor of the storehouse next to the cow barn they also threshed grain … I helped. By swinging the stick that had another stick fastened to it, over my head, and striking it … I got quite good at it, although the little kids from the neighborhood would come watch me … All little clowns, each and every one wearing too short a shirt and grinning like toads … one hand with the thumb in their mouth, the other on their pee-pee … Lunch was brought out from the house and set up in the shade … A big piece of dark bread and a dish of buttermilk … I ate so greedily I almost broke the spoon … “This climate makes the boy hungry as a wolf,” mother said. Anica and I went into the little white log building that they had shown me the first time. It was the coolest place to be. There were two benches in it and a heavy whetstone … Anica looked me straight in the eyes. She pulled her skirt up to her chin and showed me her strange, smooth pee-pee with its pink little slit down the middle. My hair stood on end. She nodded her head toward my blue shorts, as though to say I should, too … I unfastened the buttons and showed her my fuse, about the size of a little finger. Now I could see her clearly and with completely different eyes. And she could see me. We weren’t the same anymore. She had brown eyes like Stanka. And if I looked closely, the same mouth and nose with wide nostrils. She just needed to get her hair combed. Have I got a wife now or something, it suddenly occurred to me. I’ll be able to stroke her in all the most forbidden places. And she can stroke me. They called her … She ran out, but as though she were dancing. If she hadn’t run, I would have fled … As a joke I tugged at her black ponytail … Outside it was very different: the dovecote, the dung heap down the hill, the ox plodding over scattered straw in a circle … I now had a friend among them, and that was more than a good thing. Maybe I would even get to talk to her … Upstairs in the house Uncle Jožef had a hayloft. That was where Ciril, Ivan, Anica and I, and sometimes Stanka would sleep. We were all dirty and sticky, our feet completely black … Anica lay next to me under a blanket. The edge of her skirt hid one of her knees from me. I wanted to squeeze it, mightily, like a wrestler. But she was a lot stronger than I was.… We had to get up early. Anica woke me up with a shaft of straw. She said something to me slowly. She was missing two front teeth. She pronounced everything word for word, so that I would repeat it … I couldn’t stand that … It made me bristle when anyone tried to talk to me. Enough! I knew where that was leading … I showed her that I was hungry. I wanted to lift her skirt to see her strange pee-pee again. But I didn’t want to repeat everything. We ate in the kitchen, which looked out over the dung heap. Cold corn mush from the night before, with bitter hot black coffee poured over it. Then to work … The grain was waiting for us … and then the upland meadow.
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