Newcomers

by Lojze Kovacic

  Peter and Andrej were two tenacious cartridges filled up to their snotty little noses with Falconry … Their mother had Falcon outfits sewn for them that were appropriate for their age. Proper uniforms: red shirts with high collars … a jacket that had braided cords hanging from the left shoulder … a tall cap with a falcon feather … Two regular little Lilliputians that looked like they’d jumped out of their big brother’s pocket. Every day a funeral procession went down Bohorič Street toward Holy Cross at least once and occasionally several times … The black processions would turn off the little street that ran perpendicular to the Hams’s entry gate … They would drag on, bristling with heads … as many as there were dead people in the cemetery … First a policeman would appear in the intersection to stop the horse rigs, bicyclists, the occasional car … Judging from the policeman Peter and Andrej could quickly guess whether a Falcon or an Eagle had died. If the deceased was a red, they would stand on the sidewalk outside the gate, take off their caps and wait at attention for the tall black carriage drawn by two horses with plumes and the first small group of mourners to go past … if they determined from the constable that an Eagle had died, they went up to the fence and spat through the laths and the leaves onto the sidewalk, shouting “Boo! Hiss!” Because I felt sorry for dead people, I deliberately went out to stand on the sidewalk and quietly wait for the whole funeral procession to pass … not just the tall carriage with the little black angels in the patched pillars, but also the last couples, usually dressed in everyday street clothes, as they strolled here and there in the direction of Holy Cross … This was the cause of countless fights between the twins and me. “You’re an Owl! An Owl!” they railed at me … I wasn’t an Eagle … actually, I didn’t feel like I belonged to any group, which was the worst and most desolate feeling in the world … except that now and then I may have felt I belonged to God … or rather, to the conversations I had with him in the air around me, not that he ever answered or filled the emptiness with his presence …

  The twins weren’t appropriate company for me … that didn’t exist anywhere on Bohorič Street … except for a few little girls and boys who were even smaller runts than they were. There wasn’t a single house whose front door you’d see a boy or at least a girl my age, ten, if not already eleven, coming out of … Bojadamič’s son, a stuck-up giant, was already in high school … I had nothing in common with him … he led a different kind of life … out in his magnificent yard with its flowers and trellises he had everything, a set of parallel bars, colored rings, model airplanes … I also didn’t have any connection with the people up there … in the tar paper shacks behind the fences, where temporary workers lived among heaps of old metal mixed in with jobless people, beggars and Gypsies, so I didn’t take a step in that inhospitable direction … Around “Mexico” … I would go there to read the newspapers posted on the bulletin board, so I could tell Vati the news from the Spanish or Abyssinian fronts … riding around the building on bicycles or kicking a ball in the yard were the children of better parents, who were a little too self-satisfied and conceited for my taste … Living in the houses and villas with gardens nearby there were just mamma’s boys carrying pails and shovels … So I had to go down Bohorič in the opposite direction … toward the military hospital to flush out anybody who was to my liking at all … I was hanging around some dreary houses when one afternoon I heard the voice of a boy humming an aria from the opera Carmen coming out of the vestibule of a house standing where the street narrows … This was Zdravko, three years older than me … a real athlete and, judging from his speech and his build, already a young man … We sort of became friends. What bothered me about him was his thick neck, which suggested a kind of coarseness and brute force … He confided in me that he planned to become an opera singer when he grew up … nothing less than a singer, a soloist – the lead soloist in a major opera company … He told me about various opera stars, about Caruso … his great successes … his voyages across the Atlantic to America … the beautiful women who chased after him … He would practice in vestibules and hallways where there was a good echo … and I even tried it myself, I let him teach me, if only I could have had a little bit more time with him … Unfortunately we weren’t able to forge a more durable friendship, because he was older and didn’t have time, because every day when he wasn’t in school or helping his father, the driver of a brewery hitch, he was taking voice lessons with a teacher in town … That hitch of his father’s frequently bolted, spooked by wood-burning trucks, and went racing down Bohorič, the reins flying in the air, as the stacks of barrels fell off the wagon and exploded with a bang on the pavement … while his father, a powerful, ruddy-cheeked man in a leather apron down to his ankles, whip in hand, raced after them … Sometimes when he was coming home from school or his voice lesson, he would sit down beside me by the fence for five or ten minutes … “So brav müsstest du sein, wie er, etwas lernen, was dir Freude macht,”* mother would set him up as an example for me … Once when we were sitting like that, a boy wearing the lace-and embroidery-adorned clothes of a knight suddenly appeared on the sidewalk, looking so brilliant it nearly blinded me. He was wearing a high ruffled collar around his neck and shoulders, and the cross of the Knights Templar showed black on his chest. I got up and followed him, both Zdravko and I went, because that was on the way home for him … He was a regular White Prince from the Beautiful Adventures. He wore a wide-brimmed hat on his head with a plume that bobbled and he had low-cut shoes on his feet and gloves on his hands that went up to the elbow, like the ones for hunting with eagles … Besides all that, he was carrying a spear with a split flag that also had the Templars’ cross embroidered on it in silver … And his trousers! All threads, hems, patches, and braids … “That’s a crusader,” Zdravko explained to me unphased … “Ant vehr do zey ket zose krate univorms?” I asked him, beside myself. “From the Franciscans …” “You chust ko zehr ant zey kiff you a speer ant ze cloze?” … “No, you have to apply, attend mass a lot, distribute literature door to door …” Zdravko ran off home, but I followed the crusader to the end of the street, followed him to the train tracks … the military hospital … across the bridge … all the way to some ugly building that he entered like a ghost from another world. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Something like that really existed? I wanted to become a crusader like that … They also had shields, Zdravko explained to me, and they carry swords in processions … That was something! To change your clothes and yourself! That’s what I wanted! It was like becoming Tarzan, Robin Hood, a gangster … If only I could bring myself to go there, to the Triple Bridge and the Franciscan brothers.

  *You just need to be as diligent as he is, learn to do something that gives you pleasure.

  AT THE START of the school year Vati had to show up at school. It was there that he found out that I’d flunked the previous year and was doing third grade over again … He was standing in that hallway beneath the portraits of learned men and talking with teacher Roza … I stood way off to the side, because adult conversations interested me less than the dirt beneath my fingernail. To this day. Miss Roza was as pleasant as she’d been the year before, when we lived in Jarše, and all flushed in the face … I saw Vati flinch at the news … and his hand drop while holding his sooty hat … how much grayer he was … Yet another jolt. After so many had assaulted him that he’d broken into splinters … I couldn’t bear to watch it … I could have spared him this blow … Oh, yes! I couldn’t stand causing anyone pain. I absolutely forbade myself any malicious act … I would sooner have let any mischief, treachery, greed, or cowardice pass than have to be the cause of someone else’s pain … I would rather have committed harakiri or cut off a finger than see anyone have to cry on account of me, as I had to cry on account of others a number of times … I hated the devil, Satan, that vicious freeloader … I wanted to go up, and I strove and sought and longed for God and heaven … I didn’t want to go to hell for things that depended entirely on me … “And the report card?…
He destroyed it?!” I heard Roza’s voice … Getting a certified copy would require rubber stamps, running from courthouse to courthouse, it meant yet another expense … This was bad!… Miss Roza was beside herself … she called for the new teacher who was going to teach me, Mr. Marok, to come see her … What would this one be like?… The door to the teachers’ lounge opened behind my back … He was here … Oh God … he looked like he’d stepped out of an antique store! Broad-shouldered, stocky, big belly … a fat head with no neck and regular feather dusters for a mustache, with sideburns that flowed down into his wide shirt with a dirty necktie and the dirty necktie into a sweater the color of kohlrabi … But his voice, I have to admit, was beautiful, like a basso profundo’s … Vati kept blinking as he listened to both of them … and I could practically feel the fury shaking inside him … electrifying his hands. I knew I was going to be punished … justly so … I would endure it … But I would show them my teeth if they were going to try to drag the beating out into infinity … Then finally back home! Everyone sat stunned … mother, Clairi, even Gisela, who was worried how much blood the rod would send spurting this time … Their mouths were all open, as though the news was so big it wouldn’t fit in. The staring and disbelief lasted the whole day, until evening … and then a whole week … They couldn’t get their mouths shut, as though their jaws had come out of joint … I couldn’t sit or lie down for all the bruises … “Hör zu,” Clairi said to me … “Wie kannst du so schlecht in der Schule sein, wo du so ein Köpfchen hast? Und lügen dabei? Und ein wichtiges amtliches Papier vernichten?”* She was shocked, furious, pitying … she looked at me in disbelief … me, a gargoyle, a phantom who stood somewhere beyond Hades … “Du wirst dir das Leben versauen … Sie werden dich ja in die Erziehungsanstalt oder sogar ins Gefängnis stecken …”† She was at her wit’s end. Vati left me alone … but oh, how he shook the table, the boxes, and threw the pliers on the floor … Mother didn’t want to have anything to do with me, she couldn’t bear to look at me … There was just Gisela … she was my angel of God … And of course Clairi. She would thoughtfully wake me up in the morning … twist the lamp so I could find my socks … spread the lard thick on my bread, if there was any … She would try to arouse some interest in me for the day’s classes … Kiss me in the doorway … She became a regular nuisance!… I knew that I’d lost a year of my life. Oh, if I just could have rolled up in a ball like a hedgehog.

  Mr. Marok also taught handicrafts … basket weaving using different colored papers, sawing little shelves, crocheting. Drawing was hardest for me. Marok drew a ship on the blackboard, a big pot with holes for the cabins. I drew a similar one, only I added everything I’d seen on steamboats on the Rhine: in addition to the smokestacks and railings I drew signal masts, little flags, the captain’s bridge, and all around the boat swarms of tugboats and freighters like little bacilli … My bench neighbor, Bajželj, had drawn a steamship in perspective … with its prow raised and its stern low as it sailed on the horizon … Pot-bellied Marok came padding over in his slippery suit and kohlrabi sweater … he was excited about Bajželj’s drawing on account of its perspective … this was something … he pinned it up to the board as an example for everyone … Bajželj got an A and I got a C. It didn’t help to do what they said, or be disobedient … I had no head for other things … I calculated everything wrong on the abacus … my language assignments teemed with mistakes.… my handwriting was all smudged and I could barely read … Rote answers to questions while standing in front of the class … would have to be heard to be believed … It was torture to pronounce each word … they were like little stone cubes that it took all my effort to push out of my mouth with my tongue … out of my throat, the corners and hollow of my mouth … There wasn’t much I could do with them, least of all express myself … I couldn’t like anyone, get mad or laugh at a joke with them. All the words were wrapped in thorns or compressed into balls of tangled threads … there was no way to take hold of them or turn them around, much less disentangle them … It just wouldn’t work! It was a mystery … One of my schoolmates named Robert also lived on Bohorič. He was a pale, blond boy. It was strange that I hadn’t become aware of him before. His father was a train engineer … Once he invited me over to their house. They had a big, bright kitchen with four windows on two sides, with every possible dish simmering and sizzling on a big range … His mother was a pretty, freckled lady whose red hair and little green apron suited her perfectly … I sat on a painted cabbage box and watched as, kneeling beside him, she tried to feed my colleague beef soup with light groat dumplings one spoon at a time. The boy refused and his pretty mother had to beg him with each spoonful. A spoonful for daddy, a spoonful for grandma, and on and on … I couldn’t believe it! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been like that … maybe in Basel or when I was in the hospital, but even then I must have been hopeless with asthma … His mother served me with hearty pastries, which were golden inside like her fine skin, and had a brownish crust like the little roof over the secret little house that she hid under her heart-shaped apron. Between Robert’s mother and the atmosphere filling that prosperous white kitchen, I had enough scents and colors to keep me satisfied for a full month.

  At home they were now allowing me my own tiny place at the table to do my homework. I felt a resistance to numbers … to the arithmetical symbols + – × : themselves … I would furrow my brow when they looked at me from the page, because that’s how one thought … you couldn’t just lure your brain out with limesticks … My resistance to school got stuck on them like some little toad. I didn’t have the slightest inclination to illuminate the darkness inside my head like some castle hall. It would have made my head hurt … There was nobody I could ask for help with anything – not mother, not Vati, not Clairi … They didn’t understand the rules of arithmetic, much less of grammar … I jotted down an equation and answer based foremost on how elegant they looked. For the answers I would choose numbers that didn’t appear in the equation above or, if they did, I would change their sequence. It developed into a kind of drawing. I scribbled out the writing and grammar assignments hastily, from the topmost to the bottommost letter in my notebook I could see my hand moving deftly and with childish ignorance as I wrote them … as though it were playing in sand. One day I’ll master these things the way I breathe … without any agony. I would have preferred not to have anything more to do with these notebooks, erasers, and pen holders, even though big, fat, juicy ones with tails on them, the kind only Marok knew how to draw, kept glaring at me from out of my notebooks … In the morning before classes some of my schoolmates would hastily copy the star students’ homework. I could see fat Marok going from bench to bench, reading them and assigning good grades, without those knuckleheaded cheats having to lift an eyebrow. That was cheap, tricking Marok, because he was ugly enough as it was and all he had in the world was his beautiful voice … My backpack began to stink of classrooms and benchs, as though I were lugging the whole school home … I threw it into the farthest corner. That was enough for one day! I wanted to have some peace in the afternoons … I went out and looked at what few interesting things there were on our street. At least that was something, even though I still didn’t have any friends …

  *Listen, how can you be so bad at school when you’ve got such a bright little head on your shoulders? And lie, to boot? And destroy an important official document?

  †You’re going to mess up your life … They’re going to put you in a reform school or even in prison.

  ZDRAVKO ALL BUT DISAPPEARED for a time and sickly Robert was always out on errands with his mother. He needed a lot of air … I was left with Gisela, the twins, or the old monkeys over behind the hospice’s fence. I couldn’t understand how a person could become so old and decrepit and still feel like living. Particularly in as messy a yard as that. If only the old folks were at least a little bit nice. But sometimes their eyes would start glinting as though a whole madhouse had just opened up in their heads. They al
so sang now and then, sometimes in the middle of the night, like monks … I could hear them through the wall. They didn’t have bad voices.

  Finally I gave myself a kick and headed over to the barracks. I climbed up the fence and looked in. What utter poverty! The wooden shacks were as shabby as those plague-eaten horses in the pictures of my illustrations … Heaps of rusted metal, pipes, strips, and sheets … And what wasn’t strewn around the gate … motorcycle tires, holy icons, horse collar padding … But they had piglets in pens, with chickens pecking around, and rabbits in warrens … There was a brilliant sign on the fence: “Cunt and prick make little Dick,” next to which there was a picture of something like poop dropping into a potty … A few boys with bowl haircuts came out accompanied by girls. I wasn’t afraid of them … they seemed to be shyer than I was. I particularly liked one of the girls. She was wearing a skirt that probably belonged to her mother, because it reached to the ground. Her ass almost bounced like a ball. Dark hair. With a little ring on her tanned hand … They invited me to come on over the wall … Lots of interesting wrenches lying around heaps of old metal, some of which would have made fine brass knuckles. And cleaning rods like arrows. Unusual package-like parts of machines. And fat rubber bands for slingshots and tanks that you could make out of spindles. Sheets of aluminum. Glass liquor bottles … I kept close to my Gypsy girl. She let me know that she liked me. She was like Adrijana and Anka rolled into one … We scaled a few little fences and in an empty, abandoned pigpen with high walls we kissed each other on the dry cinders; she put her tongue in my mouth … she stroked my balls so hard, with both hands, the way the little Gypsy girls in Cegelnica begged for a dinar, and I stroked her cherry with its little groove. Her little sisters and brothers exploded with laughter. They made fun of our caresses by rubbing themselves between the legs and kissing the air with big, puffed-up cheeks, as if in some big movie … When I came back the next day, firmly resolved to see our nastiness to its end, my girlfriend was gone … she had moved … It was always like that: either I moved or others did.