Karel forbade us to draw any water out of the well for cooking, which is why I had to go down to a spring near the timber and masonry house of a woodsman. Then I had to help Karel throw all the old litter out of the barn and carry it in baskets down to the dung heap. Then use an old bucket on a stick to scoop up the urine and pour it into an old barrel. Then carry the barrel to the back wall of the hen house, where others like it already stood in a row. Clean out the manger, then spread out new litter for the animals. Feed them … Those poor cows that Aunt Mica milked needed a lot of attention … The dappled, the gray, the white, all of them were prettier than Mica. How could they bear to have her crusty forehead pressing against their lovely bellies? And have her fingers tug at their udders? How could they obey her squeaky voice, endure her interminable giggling?… They crowded together and looked at me askance from under their heavy eyelids, their yellow eyes … When storms raged and there was lightning over the barn, when the weather overturned carts, upended baskets and carried whole bushels of meadow down to the water … it was best to stay here with them. They weren’t afraid of anything. They just rustled the hay as they chewed or rested with their eyes closed. What God was doing out there … with those clouds in the sky, the apple trees, the carts, was just business as usual for them. They weren’t available for it. They didn’t recognize it.
One afternoon when I came back from raking at Uncle Jožef’s, Karel was waiting for me on the path. Angry. “Du niks arbeiten da,”‡ he said. He put a hoe in my hand and pointed back where the potato field was … Was he saying I hadn’t done anything around the house?… Mother had spent all morning digging up potatoes. Due to her fat goiter and I don’t know how many varicose veins she couldn’t do any more … So she had left her sickle and muddy shoes outside the house and staggered off to lie down. Even Gisela had helped aunt in the morning to pick through the beans in the kitchen, even though mother didn’t like to see them together … I struck once, twice at a furrow. But the sun was too strong and my bones hurt so much from bending over in the high meadow … Let him think whatever he wants! No, I’m not going to dig anymore!… Angrily I flung the hoe back toward the train tracks and headed for the house … Karel, who had just been unhitching Liska from a pear tree, shouted, “Zurieck!”§ and bounded after me. I took off at a sprint and he started running and because he happened to have the chain in his hand, he hurled it at me from a distance so that it wrapped around my back and chest … I thought I was going to puke my lungs and heart out … I fell down flat on the cement by the well … Suddenly mother was outside, yelling “Mörder!” She literally carried me several yards past Mica, who had come out to look, and into the house … In our room she got me out of my trousers. Across my chest there were stinging red marks that were visibly swelling from the chain links, as though they had bitten me. The worst thing was that my back hurt and I had to lie on my stomach. I couldn’t get any air … I hadn’t done any less work than Ciril or Ivan … I just didn’t know how to work with as much ease, momentum and skill as they did, that was true. I really admired them … Especially when we raked hay first into a stack, then onto a cart, and at last into the barn. They could stab a whole houseful of hay onto their pitchforks and hoist it from the ground onto a haycart or from a cart into the loft – while standing on a ladder!… Such a big bale that I couldn’t wrap my arms around it. And if I hugged it too tight, I’d start to feel its thorns … I heard talking outside, Vati’s weak voice … Was it already so late? Had I slept?… Mother had covered me in damp rags, causing me to shiver even more from the stinging cold … Uncle Karel came into the room. He was wearing his hat and his jacket was unbuttoned. He was entirely white in the face. This was the first time I’d seen him like this … expressionless … He was carrying a plate with a sausage, a big pear, and a thick slice of bread on it. He had come to pay me a visit. Like in the hospital. “Here,” he said, setting the plate down on a bench. He patted me on the shoulder and kept patting until I smiled at him and he smiled, too. With his whole mouth this time, causing the tips of his mustache to quiver. He stood next to the bed for a while. We looked at each other … His eyes dried up and there was less and less of a smile in them … Oh, I knew we would never be friends!… Then Vati came and sat beside me. “Du mußt jetzt arbeiten, weil es die Zeit der Ernte ist,” he said. “Ein halber Tag bei Stritz Josef, die andere Hälfte beim Karl. Dann, wo du bald in die Schule gehst, wirst du nur dem Karl helfen.”‖ … Something shifted in the small of my back. An indentation on one side and a protrusion on the other … “Schau nur, was deine Grobiane von Brüdern mit dem Kind angestellt haben,” mother shrieked like a siren. “Wir müssen ins Krankenhaus.”a She hugged me with her arms, her breasts, her belly. “Beruhige dich, Lisbeth. Es heilt sich von selbst, so hat es der Doktor gesagt,”b Vati said to her … So had some doctor been here during this time? While I’d been sleeping?… Mother refused to calm down … She stood in the middle of the room. She was trying to illuminate the whole room like an arrow, a storm with her anger, her voice and her gestures … “Laß das, Mama, die Leute lachen uns aus,”c I said angrily.
After that Karel took me along to a livestock auction. To assuage a bad conscience, out of remorse? Unfortunately he planned to sell Liska there … She swatted her tail back and forth behind us on the path over the train tracks as we led her uphill and alongside a road. First him, then me, by turns. With her in the middle and one of us on each side, not together … At the market, in simple pens there were hundreds and hundreds of cows. Some horses, mostly dray horses. Pigs. Goats. A lot of fowl, too. Noise, dust … plenty of good manure went to waste under hoof and underfoot at the market that day. I studied the peasants, the laborers, the shepherds big and small. I stood next to Liska … actually, I sat on a box of feed belonging to the next peasant over … Liska was not in a good mood. She wanted to lie down and have a good nap … Uncle Karel came back with some company. He brought me a bottle of šabesa. This was a sweet drink with lilac and lemon that instead of a cork had two little balls in the neck of the bottle … Everyone was covered in sweat, as though they were dying. I saw some big money … oh, let me tell you about all the banknotes, enough to paper whole walls … going from hand to hand … Overall, though, the peasants were low-key. Karel didn’t sell anything … Though he tried … He called on God as his witness … I saw him as if on a stage: his earnest face … his cheerful face … his clever face … We went home. We tied Liska up to a tree outside the railway station and went into a restaurant where insects were flying around the rotten potatoes and it smelled of hard liquor … He ordered two servings of goulash … and rolls, a whole mountain of rolls … The goulash was too spicy for me, even though it was delicious … But the rolls! This was the first time I’d tasted white bread in three months!… The taste of their soft centers reached my nose, my eyes, almost my brain. Karel started to drink with a group that had gathered. I went out to join Liska … ripped up some grass for her … and came back. My uncle was drinking with his buddies at a round table. He introduced me, and the bowlegged peasants took as much interest in me as I did in them … He forced me to drink a little glassful no bigger than a thimble … with a swallow of brandy at the bottom. I didn’t like it. He laughed, but again his eyes were not laughing. Oh God, was I scared. This was really a bad sign …
Then I was outside during a storm for the first time. We were pulling up turnips in the rain in Karel’s field on the far side of the tracks, not far from the shack of the crazy woman down from the bright house that stood up there as if it was on stilts. We threw a whole expanse of their tousled leaves, their long mottled feathers up onto a cart … a first one, a second, a third … It was pleasant, I was wearing my shorts, and the rain and dirt had done a thorough job of soaking and spattering me … Everyone was grinning … we had a common enemy, the downpour … “Bubi, quick … what fun!” they shouted. My happiness was showing through all the layers of mud … but I also took care not to say anything … That’s just what they’re waitin
g for!… The sky was literally bearing down on the black woods like an enormous log of coal … then some terrible flash … white! blinding! – as though God wanted to show us an X-ray of some enormous lungs full of black clouds, or the fury in his eyes through lightning … Click! Click! Click!… Ka-BOOM!… as if some huge porcelain marble had just shattered to pieces. And the rain … whole rivers of rain. We were all soaked to the skin, it poured onto us as though off an eave. Stanka was wearing some sort of light gown … with all of her contours showing through, her breasts, her hips, her rear end – so the beauty had a body, after all!… The rain was as hard as a body … it stuck to everything, and we almost couldn’t work our way through the furrows back to the cart … But the most important thing was the thunder, the downpour, the lightning, and that no one was afraid, nobody hid, we were all just grinning like fools … I hopped around in a puddle on one leg, I didn’t care … I opened my mouth wide and guzzled the water that came streaming down off a broken branch … Others came and joined me, I wasn’t alone. That’s what was important!…
One day Vati finally moved. He had found a job at the headquarters of the Elite Company in Ljubljana. He had also found a room. He left on a Sunday evening. He promised to come back every Saturday and bring his week’s wages. Or send it by mail. It wouldn’t be much, since he would have to deduct his room and board … He also took his wicker suitcase with him on the train. That’s where he kept his hides and the last of his furs from Basel. He would use these to sleep on, since the room he was renting was unfurnished, because that way it was much cheaper. But in his free time, he said, he was going to sew muffs out of animal skins, fur hats, collars … whatever the world wanted of fashion at the moment, and he would sell them from door to door …
Now mother, Gisela, and I were alone … without him. Mother told me, “Du mußt slowenisch lernen, daß wir uns mit den Stritzen besser verstehen.”d Of course I wanted to, but … On Monday morning there was a lock on the well, so that we wouldn’t be tempted to draw water out of it in spite of the ban … Consequently, every morning I went first thing down to the spring, so that I wouldn’t run into anybody. At first with a bucket, then with a bowl, and finally with bottles … I had to put up a healthy supply … who could say what Karel would think up that day … he might, for instance, lock us into the house, or he might lock us out of it … The water flowed between two marly stones … and was as pure as crystal … with a little fish swimming in it every now and then … you had to be careful not to dirty the water … Now and then the woodsman came walking across the footbridge. He was a muscular, red-cheeked, gray-haired man. He wore a kind of gray uniform with a green stripe on his knickers. He tended the forests alongside the railway line all the way to the end or the start of the Krka. This well, which everyone was welcome to draw from, was also his … He stepped across the narrow footbridge in his leather leggings. I pretended not to have seen him. In our room mother cooked on a small round stove. She was short of lard … and she didn’t want to subject herself to the humiliation of asking Karel for more. Neither did I. I just knew when I needed to head out to pasture … with Liska, and Gray … and when I needed to clean out the barn. That was all. I snuck into the kitchen. With a spoon I swiped a bit of lard out of the cupboard in the entryway and evened out its surface at the top of the black pot. And if they did notice … then it could also have been rats, which had already consumed a quarter of what was up in the attic, anyway … Mother stayed in our room and constantly complained. She would pace back and forth, nervously balling her hands into fists. “Warum sind wir hierhergekommen … Warum sind wir nicht nach Saarbrücken gegangen, zu meinen Brüdern nach Saarlouis. Was für ein Dasein! Was für ein Misgeschick!”e I couldn’t stand to listen to it anymore. Everywhere we had been, she had just complained … in Basel … in our upper floor room in the Gerbergässli … in the old house next to the park with the police station in it … in the nice building next to the Christian brothers’ school … on the Elizabethplatz … in the rue Helder … even the rue de Bourg, where we had a whole floor to ourselves …
*What is old slant eyes saying again?
†Something about mass, that she can’t go to church wearing this dress.
‡You not any work there!
§Come back here! (pronounced with a strong Slovene accent)
‖You have to work now, because this is harvest time. A half day for Uncle Josef and the other half for Karel. Then, when you start going to school soon, you’ll just help Karl.
aJust look at what your loutish brothers have done to our child! We have to get him to the hospital.
bCalm down, Lisbeth. The doctor said it will heal itself.
cQuit, mother, or people will just laugh at us.
dYou have to learn Slovene now, so that we can communicate better with the stritzes (uncles – Slovene)
eWhy did we come here … Why didn’t we go to Saarbrücken, to my brothers in Saarlouis. What sort of existence is this! What a disaster!
SHE WROTE to Neunkirchen, Saarbrücken and Saarlouis asking for help. To her sisters, her brothers … That’s where she was born, that was her home, she knew all the people there, had gone to school and grown up with them … She would tell me about that place … and it hovered in a sort of cloud in my head. A small town with red roofs … a big central square … the nine towers of Neunkirchen on the horizon … Her mother was French with the surname of Fraigunau, her father was German, a tailor named Faist. They’d had twenty children. This was because her mother would always send her after her father, so she knew where he was. And why did she have to go after her father? To get him to come home? Yes, exactly!… She had nineteen brothers and sisters. And in addition they had five tailor’s assistants and a maid in the house. On Sundays when they went to church, all the men – her father, brothers, and the assistants – were identically dressed and likewise all the women – her mother, sisters and the maid … “Da kommt die Faistkompagnie heranmarschiert …,”* people would say … They had a big house and out front it had a sign that said “Adolf Faist, Tailor …” And in the back there was a terrace … embroidered curtains and everywhere little cushions and pillows … That’s where she and her brothers and sisters would gather, that’s where they played and laughed their way through so many things. Oh, the games they had played and the pranks they had pulled!… As a little girl she had a special box where she kept a globe, a pencil, and a pretty little cask. The cask was her secret and she showed it to nobody. Once she lost it and couldn’t find it again. She cried and was disconsolate for a full year … The fact that she had once been a little girl intrigued me most of all … She also had a photograph of herself from then, taken at her confirmation … a browned image on cardboard, with the name of the photographer written in silver. She was kneeling at a prie-dieu, with her prayer book bound in white leather lying open atop it. She herself was dressed all in white with a veil gathered in a bunch on her head and a cross made of cypress wood hanging around her neck … Her face, which was younger than mine, already showed features of the woman she would grow up to be … This girl, who was roughly my age, had given me birth – not this woman standing next to me now … I studied the girl’s face, her eyes, her little nose, her mouth, her hands gloved up to the elbow … At the age when this was taken, even though she was already a first communicant, she would have played with me and understood me. Just think what time had done since then, when she was perched on her knees on a prie-dieu with the arch of an old-fashioned door in the white background … Time had galloped off with her like a horse through all kinds of misty landscapes and set her down here … In her accounts of that time you could hear the silken rustle of their satiny clothing, the kerchiefs and Brussels lace, which was so delicate that the slightest gust would carry it off the terrace and into the neighbor’s garden … Her father had been a good and fair man. In his photo he had a mustache but also seemed gentle in his high stand-up collar. Her mother was a stout woman and wore a ribbon around her neck with a small wa
tch hanging from it. Both pictures were gray, rough and murky, probably because both of them had died long ago … Then there were photos of a brother, a soldier wearing a Pickelhaube who had fallen in the war, a sister at her wedding, and her oldest brother, Hagedorn, who ever since 1900 had been a wild game hunter in India and wore a helmet made out of cork … Soon came the time when mother got engaged. He had been a non-commissioned officer with red hair, the cashier of some unit in Saarlouis … “Ein Kassiermeister. Er sorgte für die Geldkasse seines Regiments,”† mother said. I got the impression she still thought about him. “Er war immer ein so betrübter Mensch,”‡ she said. I imagined him in his green uniform carrying a metal cash register under one arm … such a giant that his head nearly touched the ceiling … She had told me about him so many times that I already understood she was secretly still bound to him … It’s best to be nineteen or twenty years old, she would say … If she had married the army cashier, he would probably be my father now … and I would have been born into a completely different family … and would be looking through some other window than this one, with its view of a growing dung heap and the Krka … I would be sitting in some other room, which would be warm, with other furniture, in another city … in a city with red roofs and nine churches … where a little bell would jingle and I would go downstairs into a dimly lit dining room for supper, where other sisters and other brothers would be sitting around a table covered with a white tablecloth … all of them unborn … “Und dann kam dein Vater,”§ mother said. Yes, Vati had turned up in the course of his second trip to Saarlouis … he had come from these parts here … and as a certified tailor got a job working for Lisbeth’s father … Things grew dark in this part of the story – as though some black shadow came out of a narrow side street and crossed the main square toward the big house on its far side. Vati! He who would henceforth be at fault for everything. The lout who understood nothing. The egotist!… He was a short, thin, pale young man with very bushy hair and dressed like a dandy … Tight-lipped. And he worked from morning to night in the workshop. Anyone could easily imagine what he’d been like … “Was wahr ist ist wahr … er war ein braver Arbeiter. Aber als Mensch …”‖ He fell in love with her and wanted to get married … but she didn’t want to have anything to do with him … She was in love with her non-commissioned officer … Vati went chasing after her all through the house and town … “Er jagte mich durch das ganze Haus, er griff immer nach meiner Hand, ich lief die Treppe hinauf zu meinen Brüdern und Schwestern. Wir lachten über ihn …”a That part was really unnecessary. That part really hurt! Thank God her father was smarter than her. Because Vati was a conscientious and exceptionally talented worker, he ordered her to be a lot nicer to him from then on … She had to go out with him for walks around town, down the avenue, to dances, and she remembered one Sunday as they were walking down some side-street two women at windows up above saying to each other, “Schau was dort für ein häßlicher Mann mit der Lisbeth geht.”b … My God, how ashamed she was. Only tall, stout, powerful men counted as handsome and trustworthy in those days, and he was such an unappealing little scarecrow … I couldn’t swallow this. Not just because I felt sorry for him, but because it wasn’t true! Sure, he was quiet, and thin. But he was also handsome! All you had to do was look at him … A great head of hair, a really fine face … and a lissome build … “Ja, heute ist er schöner, als er damals war, jetzt bin ich abscheulich …,”c she said. Robert, her paymaster beau, was still counting on her … How was that? Well, they still got together once a week under the arch of some side street. He would stand there and wait for her every day, whether she came or not. Each day she had just a ten-minute window. “Und nachdem kam es zu einer Tragödie …”d What tragedy? How?… Robert came under suspicion of having misappropriated his regiment’s money, which in fact he hadn’t done. He killed himself. How? “Ich weiß nichts mehr …”e She got married to Vati and then moved into a small apartment in a suburb of Neunkirchen. At the beginning they supported themselves by sewing buttons onto military uniforms. Every week a cart with buttonless uniforms stopped at their door and every week it left and returned to the barracks with a cart full of uniforms with the buttons sewed on … Then they moved to Belgium in search of more remunerative work, and that’s where Clairi was born, in Brussels in 1910. Two years after that they took little Clairi and moved to Basel. Things weren’t much better there … Vati took on a lot of short-term jobs while she let out rooms to boarders … she only rented to opera performers, including the famous singer Maria Petri, who later committed suicide. Then they rented a house with a store on Rue della Couronne. In 1914 … “Es war damals gerade ein paar Tage vor dem Kriege …”f Swiss Germans marched through Basel, breaking display windows and shouting against the Serbs. They came to Rue della Couronne and demolished the whole house, the store, and beat up Vati … In 1916 Margrit was born … I saw a photo taken during mardi gras when both girls attended a masquerade party disguised as a Gypsy couple, one taller, the other shorter, with tambourines and wearing big earrings … Both of them had mother’s nose, but only Margrit had inherited Vati’s eyes. There was also a photo of mother and Vati with little Clairi when she was four years old and they’d just moved to Basel. Vati was seated in a chair looking pleasant and young, while mother sat in another chair already looking older, with her hair done up in something that looked like a two-headed pillow … The time when they really started to make money came after the war … when Hagedorn arrived in Europe from India … and they worked out a deal where he would send them the finest furs for half price. Vati passed an exam qualifying him as a master furrier. Their assets began to grow … a house and two stores … half-page advertisements in the newspapers … their own stand at the international “Kürschnermesse”g in Leipzig in 1925, a phonograph with a horn, a violin and piano for the girls … Clairi and Margrit began going to their first dances … If only father had been a better manager … but he just perched in his workroom and sewed … he didn’t like mixing in company, he didn’t want to join the “Gewerbekammer”h … it was something important if you were a member of it … he declined Swiss citizenship because he wanted to move back to his homeland … And the money! Somebody came from the Yugoslav embassy to ask him to donate to help build a Yugoslav club and then disappeared with the money. It amounted to a lot of franks … And then all the money he paid up front to suppliers! In 1928 I entered the picture. This was the part that most interested me!… Though he was up to his ears in debt, Vati was practically delirious with joy … that day he flew through the workshop, overturning tables and shouting, “Ein Bub! Ein Bub! Einen Sohn habe ich bekommen!”i … It warmed my heart to hear it. Because I was German on mother’s side and Slovene on his, he wanted to give me a special name beside his own. Samson is what they entered in the baptismal certificate … “Und dann kam es zur Überraschung!”j Namely, the great crisis of 1929 … when everything went wrong … and that was it for the house, the store, Gritli’s and Clairi’s parties … and they were back to trying to earn enough just to live … “Und du warst ein großer Lümmel und dann zwei Jahre krank,”k she said … First Hagedorn died and then all of the other siblings but four … “Ich weiß nicht, ob jemand überhaupt noch lebt …”l She asked them to help, composed a long letter – as thick as a pillow … she was one of the oldest children and in Saarlouis had always had to look after the younger ones … At last she actually sent the letter but never got a response. Nor did the letter itself get returned to sender … Now she always had to wait for Vati to come back or for him to send money before she could buy stamps. But even then she would hesitate before dropping them in the mailbox, because at bottom she didn’t expect any answer … “Gewiß sind sie alle unter diesem blöden Hitler gestorben oder verreist …”m
Newcomers Page 9