Newcomers

by Lojze Kovacic

  Finally I got my chance to see the frescoes and rifles in old Mrs. Hamman’s apartment again … Clairi took me along when she went to visit her … The old lady invited us to sit at a tall brown wicker table and served us cream. Oh, if only I could have lived in such peace and abundance! I would just read books and draw and never leave the house to go anywhere again … The old lady gave me a little metal box that showed a sepia film of an African scene … a hunter sitting on a fallen log in a tropical jungle … and another film from an operetta: female dancers in short skirts, with plumes on their heads … There were two reels in the box that I could turn to make the film go forwards and backwards … You saw the scene play when you aimed the device at the light … That hand-operated movie theater allowed me to instantly strengthen my friendship with Karel and Ivan … Now in winter practically nothing happened. Sometimes we went to the movies if we had the money for it … Movies about stubborn pilots who didn’t obey their generals and wore straw hats instead of helmets and then became exemplary heroes … Outside the warehouse we built a fort with firing slits out of snow and poured water on it so it would freeze overnight … What if we made a theater, it occurred to me. The red room, which was cold and damp, was still empty and we could build a stage in it. We could filch the boards from construction sites … sew a curtain out of some sheets … The Prinčičes’ mother invited me inside … Now I would sit with Ivan and Karel in the workshop behind the back wall of their store … Ivka was there, and Silva … all three of them sewing hat crowns. Both brothers and I would crouch on the floor near the stove, winding hat ribbons up on our fingers … Sometimes the two girls and their mother would sing. Not hit songs, but real ones. About a Gypsy, an orphan who was driven away from home … about a stepdaughter out in a cold storm and snow covering hill and vale, who falls asleep on her mother’s grave … Tears came to my eyes … Then we told stories. I talked about Basel … about its attractions … the shop that we had on the Gerbergässli … about Vati’s assistants … about the rabbit farm he was going to build in Polica next spring when the females got pregnant … I could feel my prestige growing, but still I avoided Ivka’s willful eyes the whole time.

  *I don’t want to get involved in politics.

  †If we don’t join, they’ll put us in a camp, no questions asked. On the other hand, if we do join, we’ll get some support.

  ‡What are we joining?

  §Go out and play.

  SERGEANT MITIČ AND VATI were sitting in the first room, looking at a map that the former had brought … German tank units were approaching the Maginot Line, with British, French, and Belgian divisions all around. Now it was France’s turn … It had already lost its best divisions. The ones that were left were mediocre. Even their air force was nothing much. The Germans could attack with a hundred and twenty divisions and have another thirty in reserve … The attack was going to be like a blow from a blacksmith’s hammer …

  It was our topic of conversation out on the embankment, too … War was in the air … and sometimes so were airplanes. Yugoslav ones. They would fly in a starlike formation. Blue gray Messerschmidts and blotched Hurricanes. Sometimes they would suddenly appear in attack formation from behind the castle tower. Gigantic crosses with spinning screw propellers … the bombers more slowly, the pursuit aircraft more quickly – flew over the square and Star Park … their din drowning out the street noise. People became a kind of dough under these metal factories in the air, no longer significant … at the Ursuline Church the squadron of crosses lifted their noses and flew up into the sky, like skaters heading out onto the rink of an ice palace … If France, that distant country, fell, what would be next?… “If Great Britain helps, then everything will be fine,” I said … Andrej had his own opinion … which he’d got from a friend of Neva’s, who was a mechanic at the airport … Air power would be decisive … if England contributed its Halifaxes, which were best at nighttime bombardments, and its two-engine Mosquitos, which were quicker than German pursuit planes, France would be able to defend itself before the onslaught of Hitler’s tank destroyers …

  At that time a blonde girl from Breg whom Franci had seen before would often walk along the riverfront. She and her mother delivered newspapers door to door, not the Morning, but the Slovene Nation … Her name was Tatjana. She made herself right at home walking down the embankment. Starting at the Triple Bridge she would cover the whole territory down to Cobblers’ Bridge, as though she didn’t care in the least what we thought of it. Occasionally we noticed her from a distance when she turned past the ostaria. She had such pale blonde hair that her head was like a bunch of straw and she always wore clothes that looked like they had been sewn out of bed slips and throw rugs … She waved her arms a lot when she walked. She never stepped on the sidewalk or roadway, she just always walked on the curb … Once when we saw her coming our way again, Firant said, “Guys, what if this girl is spying for the Castle or Trnovo?…” That was entirely possible. We watched as she walked past the Black Cat restaurant … “Hey, you! Stop!” Drago shouted just as she reached the trees. She immediately stood still and turned toward us. We were sitting in a kind of pyramid: some on the ground, a few on the cart, one or two on the wall … Her face was wide and pale. Almost white, as if powdered. She had wide-set eyes and a small nose. She looked me straight in the face, causing everything to start flickering … Firant stopped in front of her and I could tell from the way his head was cocked that he was about to hit her … I couldn’t take that. “Leaf her alown!” I shouted out. I jumped down … shoved him aside … he looked at me furiously and I knew he was going to pay me back with interest the first chance he got. I turned to face Tatjana. What eyes this skinny girl had! Watery, bulging, as though they were floating in a glass. Yet at the same time they radiated something powerful … “You can kow here if you’re in a pig hurry,” I said. I should have said something else … like what I might say to Gisela … But there was a lump in my throat. The air would have exploded if I’d blurted anything else out. Firant puffed up his cheeks and punched them with both fists. Pop! If I hadn’t known that was him, I would have looked everywhere to find out where that smack of air had come from.

  That night I didn’t fall asleep, because I kept having to think about her, that Tatjana. Just as I thought I was about to stop thinking about her, she would appear in some gray rainbow … growing progressively sharper, even more than in daytime, and then some entirely new, unexpected detail would come floating along … suddenly she’d be wearing a necklace, then she’d get a kitten on her shoulder, or a lace-trimmed skirt and a red jacket to wear … if I had told anyone about what I thought, his jaw would have dropped and he would have started crossing himself from all the laughter … The next morning I crossed to the other side, to Breg, to see if I could catch her somewhere … I was afraid of meeting her alone, so I took Karel and Ivan along. I told them we were going to reconnoiter … On Breg there were old, fat houses from the previous century, if not the century before that, standing all in a row … resembling an enormous rotting forest, and people went in and out of the houses as though they had tree holes … We inspected this courtyard and that courtyard, then all the passageways between the walls of buildings, where we’d find doghouses and old bones lying around … In one courtyard I discovered a really nice pond made out of sandstone. I had to stand there for a while admiring it. It was almost surely from the times when the war between the Black and White princes was still going on and the knights climbed up onto rooftops and balconies on rope ladders … If Karel and Ivan hadn’t started yawning in boredom, I would have stayed in that courtyard for a full hour … even if it meant running into Škoblar, the grocer’s son who led the Breg army … We strolled past the benches where girls sat and around the big red library that the bricklayers were still working on … through the park with the bronze heads of composers outside the Music Academy … There wasn’t a trace of her anywhere, although some special air, some potable breeze blew on this side of the Ljubljanica �
�� there was something about it, there had to be something about it, it was in the air and that was that! I could feel the power of Tatjana’s presence like a fire that had to be mightily burning somewhere … The next day around the time when she usually walked down the embankment, I was sitting on the wall … I tried in vain to produce any sound … I was in seventh heaven and yet also in purgatory … The whole time it took for Tatjana to walk away in her white dress, which had black stripes so that it looked like it was scattered with burned-out matches, my heart was in my mouth. The thousand invisible threads that tied me to her broke … one after the other … When she turned onto Cobblers’ Bridge at the Kolman warehouse and then disappeared, I just stared at the warehouse door like a calf, and when I bumped into Karel’s eyes and Firant’s mouth, I jumped so fast that the cart tipped onto the street …

  THE GERMANS had made a hole in the Maginot Line: Rommel’s 2,800 tanks, so wrote the newspapers, had defeated the 4,000 armored vehicles of the Anglo-French forces … Bombs began to fall on London … on June 14th the German army invaded France. On June 21st in an old train car in a forest Marshal Pétain, who had the face of old King Peter, signed France’s armistice … The Russians marched into Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, three tiny Baltic states that had once been the property of the Russian tsar …

  A mandatory lights out was ordered in town. The streetcars ran with blue lights, as they had in Basel in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War began. The oldest cars, wonderful summer trailers with their flapping, striped little awnings, drove without any lights, and school kids, students and boys would jump up on their running boards and ride two, three, even eight stops for free … there and back … We rode in total darkness amid a whole crowd of freeloaders, past flickering display windows and people with coal-black faces who lit their way with flashlights pointed at the ground … This was a new kind of fun. A coal truck nearly plowed into a crowd, spraying all of them with hot steam … At noon they would test the sirens on the castle, which were intended for air raids … The mighty signal horn with its bird’s head wailed so piercingly that everything came to a stop and all the din and clamor of traffic around city hall was concealed beneath the sound curtain of its howl … My old stockings were rotting in my shoes. Vati had bought his rabbits and there was no money at home. I was hungry … Across from the fountain, on the same side as the bishopric, near Jurij Velikonja’s sundries store, there was a little ice cream and candy shop … I calculated everything down to the second … the minute hand on the city hall tower clock showed twenty minutes to twelve … I walked in and had a seat at a marble-top table next to the door. In their display windows, on their counter and all along the walls there were savory scones … white flour, rye flour, big and small, and cakes … butter cakes, honey cakes, chocolate, pear, and almond cakes … sliced or whole … A waitress went from table to table. I ordered two cream pastries and two slices of pear cake. Once I had finished slowly masticating them and begun drinking some water, the alarm directly above city hall started up, an ear-piercing sound that completely filled the little sweetshop … as if on command everybody turned away, holding their ears … I got up and calmy walked outside. Everything there stood gaping, trapped between the motionless street cars and paralyzed horses … The siren had not yet even reached the peak of its continually mounting intensity when I reached the monument to King Peter II …

  At home a package was waiting for me that the young son of Fischer the grocer had brought by. It contained white knee socks, a white shirt, a black necktie, a pin with a silver swastika on it, and under the shirt a silk armband: red with a white circle that had a black swastika printed on it, like a hooked, spinning wheel that drilled right into my eyes … “Das mußt du anziehen und übermorgen zum deutschen Konsulat gehen …”* This costume was of course the uniform of the Hitler Youth, which everyone, young and old alike, loathed and despised. “Schau, daß du das alles unter den Pullover oder die Jacke versteckst …”† “Ich will das nicht anziehen und ich werde nirgends hingehen.”‡ … “I vont ko zehr!” I said to Vati. Vati raised an eyebrow and kept on sewing … “Du mußt dorthin gehen, sonst werden uns die Hammans noch aus dem Haus feuern …,”§ Clairi said. She was flushed all red in the face and upset, and she must have been crying before I got there. I couldn’t sleep. The package on the table … white, black, red … was like a snake’s nest … Mrs. Hamman’s employees had sewn it together … in the courtyard I saw boxes with the remains of red and white scraps … two days later I put on the shirt, which had an H in the collar, designating Hamman’s tailor shop. They knotted my tie, stuck the pin in the knot, put on my armband … and my arm went stiff like after a vaccination. This was an even more disgusting costume than the one the Falcons wore. I used my jacket collar to hide the tie with its hooked cross when I bounded out of the house. Like a traitor hiding a bomb in his pocket … Outside the school at Vrtača where the consulate was, there were about a hundred boys waiting in line. All wearing overcoats, dwarves and giants mixed in together. Lots of dark-haired boys, a few blond ones like Hitler required. All with their hair parted on the side, all of them children of better families … A youth in corduroy trousers who was hiding his tie pin under his trenchcoat’s raised collar appeared to be in charge … “Das wird ein Ausflug und Besprechung sein,” he said … We went in rows of eight through the underpass to Večna Path, where I suddenly spied two red-haired noodles in our column … It was the Jaklič boys from Nove Jarše. What?! How did they get here? I lost my voice from the shock. When the two brothers spotted me, they instantly blushed and turned away … What was all this about? Slovenes, Germans, mischlings? The youth marching alongside the column ordered those of us who knew it to sing “Die Fahne hoch” … They sang it out loud, straight up into the windows and balconies of the buildings … How dare they do this, when this territory is Slovene? Thank God, after a bad rainstorm there weren’t many people outdoors. At the top of a slope beneath Rožnik, which was privately owned, we were supposed to form a line. “Ihr seid die Hitlerjugend, die Zukunft unseres Reiches …” the young leader began. “Ihr wißt, daß die friedliebenden Völker Deutschlands und Rußlands gegen die plutokratischen, imperialistischen Angreifer kämpfen: gegen England und die Vereinigten Staaten Amerikas … Darum müßt auch ihr üben!…”‖ We took our coats and jackets off and performed a defense and an attack … We fought in segments. First the attack, digging in, initial resistance, followed by a break. Then we continued. It was funny to watch two Hitler youths with red bands on their white sleeves wallop each other … The Jaklič boys were going after each other as if this was real … My opponent was a boy who smelled like a drugstore, a delicate mama’s boy who was practically crying, he so did not want to fight, the poor thing. I let him be … We gradually shoved our way out to the road. Alongside a creek that flowed through a ravine our commander said, “Seht, was man machen kann im Winter, wenn man keine Waffen hat und der Gegner nachstösst! Schnee in die Flüsse und Bächer schaufeln, daß sie afschwellend die Feinde festhalten!…”a My God, this was stupid!… The instant the leader summoned the boys back to assembly with his whistle, I stayed among logs up by the forest’s edge … I shoved the tie and pin and the threatening armband that was visible for miles around into my pants pocket and hightailed it out of there, taking shortcuts and detours … I hadn’t enjoyed being there for one minute … that was the strangest part. But I had to go one more time … to some auditorium on Old Square above the Salaznik Café … There were a lot of older boys, younger men, even girls there, each in a uniform with a belt strap over the right shoulder. They were happy, all of them laughing with bright, handsome faces … There were lots of other people there, too, grown-ups I recognized from around town … a skinny old man who was always dressed in a hunting coat, a richly dressed lady covered with silver bracelets and black earrings … and other ladies and gentlemen … Mrs. Hamman holding a tiny glass … both of her gentlemen, who always wore black neckties and green hats, were in some alcove playing ping-pong …
In one of the rooms I even noticed Gmeiner, the young student from Jarše … or maybe I just thought I did … I felt as though I had entered high society. They called the young ones among us into a good-sized room to practice. They closed the door and we learned to sing out of a green book. Then we played some sort of gymnastic game … while crouching, with our hands clasped at the back of the neck, we were supposed to go hopping from room to room … including the auditorium where the older people were. They made room for us and shouted high-spirited encouragement … Then it was time for the drawing … The grand prize was a ticket to the Union movie theater. I drew the right slip out of the hat, but Fischer’s young son objected. “Er kann es doch nicht bekommen. Er ist doch Slowener, sein Vater ist Slowener …”b he told the leader. This leader was not the same as the one at Rožnik … he wore corduroy trousers with a belt and strap and was a very considerate, smart fellow. “Und wenn schon. Seine Mutter ist Deutschin und er ist Mitglied der Hitlerjugend …”c The film at the Union theater was about a German mountain-climbing expedition to the Himalayas … it was full of snow and orchestral music … after fifteen minutes I ditched it and left …