Newcomers (14 page)

One Sunday the postman came by on his bicycle and hollered “Telegram!” into the kitchen. I ran outside … It was a wire from sister. “Komme Mittwoch abends ab 7 Uhr. Eure Clairi.”
^*

C
LAIRI GOT OUT AT THE STATION
. Quickly. With a suitcase and wearing her white coat, like the last time in Basel. My heart leapt at the sight of her … “Jesus, wie schaut ihr denn aus!”
^*
she gasped in
shock … Mother wearing a smock for work in the fields … me barefoot and in a ripped undershirt … She picked up Gisela, who was wearing nothing but a long undershirt … hugged her, kissed her, rubbed her face against hers … “Gisela! Gisela!… Ihr seid alle so braun!” she said over Gisela’s head, “abgemagert und älter, ganz verrunzelt …”
^†
She had brought a lot of luggage along. Uncle Jožef, who drove all three of us back in his carriage, studied her with great curiosity and surprise. Clairi was definitely beautiful. Dark curls of hair showed under her white hat with its wide, light brown ribbon, she was wearing white shoes with high heels and she had countless bracelets and rings on her hands … She smelled like the best and most expensive part of Basel … How old was she? She never told anyone. All I knew was that she was eighteen years older than me, so she must have been twenty-seven then … She shook Jožef’s hand energetically, though she didn’t like short men. “Ich habe auch deine Federdecke mitgebracht,”
^‡
she said after she gave me a big kiss. The comforter I slept under in Basel? That big, soft, fluffy bag with my name on it?… When she entered our room she closed and then opened her eyes. “Was, ein so armseliges Zimmer?… Ihr meint doch nicht im Ernst, daß wir alle vier in diesem Bett schlafen werden?”
^§
Mother just nodded. “Der Bubi wird auf dem Heuboden übernachten, jetzt wo es
noch warm ist.”
^‖
Uncle Karel looked on from the side, but his eyes were practically bulging in admiration. When Clairi caught sight of him, she batted her eyelids a bit … “Ein ganz anständiger Onkel!”
^a
Aunt Mica nodded her inflamed head … Clairi hesitated before shaking her hand. She seemed disinclined to touch anything … the bed, the door … as though every touch was a kind of boundary. Ciril and Ivan were exceptionally surprised by their new cousin. They danced attention on her … Anica was bashful and hid … Stanka and Minka looked at her with a mixture of admiration and contempt as she stood by the well outside Karel’s house in her dazzling dress sewn with dot-sized buttons … It was as though she had dropped down into our midst from out of the sky, but she was also trapped, because now she would be under their watchful eyes forever. Clairi didn’t realize this yet, but I sensed it as they milled around her and talked … As we walked through the village, they were out front, leading her like a bride. By turns Clairi’s face showed surprise, dismay, pleasure and tension … At Uncle Jožef’s house the slices of corn bread were once again out on the table. “Das ist nicht Bisquit, weißt du …” I warned her, “sondern Brot aus Kukuruz.”
^b
I explained the photos on the wall to her: grandma, grandpa, three uncles from America … “Wohin führst du mich?”
^c
she asked skeptically when I took her outside. “Ich werde
dir alles zeigen,”
^d
I said. We took Gisela with us. I showed her the shed, the hayrack, the dovecote, the horses … In the village I took her along the train tracks to the pit where Karel had buried foodstuffs in case of a war, and then to the washing stones. A thistle in the grass stuck her. She ought to have put on different shoes. So we went around to the path … The dung heap was too close to the house … she would have preferred it to be farther off, in the woods … And the toilet was just a plain shack without any water or chain to pull … just a board with a hole in it through which you could see a huge pile of excrement going back a full year … She entered the barn as though it were a prehistoric cave dwelling. “Ist das möglich?”
^e
she asked. She was seeing cows for the first time and they frightened her. It would have been more natural for her if she’d been able to approach them out in the pasture … I showed her she didn’t have anything to be afraid of … and how we milked them. I took her hand and used it to stroke Liska on her withers … Was that bad? “Not at all,” she said in delight. I told her stories about Liska and Gray … what they were like out at pasture and how they behaved at the fair … She told me how many towns and villages, houses and forests she’d seen through the window of the express train … handsome towns where she would have liked to stay, where she could have just gotten off the train. “Wenn ich aber die Augen aufschlug, sah ich immer einen kupfernen Ring im Abteil, immer den gleichen. Ich denke: in vierundzwanzig Stunden werde
ich die Augen auftun und ein anderer Mensch sein.”
^f
Then she said quietly, “Wie der Vati arm lebt in einem Kellerzimmer ohne Bett. Das darfst du keinem erzählen …”
^g
I drew her along by the arms toward the woods by the train tracks. “Ich fürchte mich vor den Tieren und Räubern, Bubi.”
^h
“Räuber gibt es nicht!”
ⁱ
Even so, I showed her a place where snakes usually gathered … One just happened to be there in among the roots. “I don’t look back!” she said. I pointed out the mark that I’d carved into a tree for myself, mother, and Gisela, so that none of us would ever stumble into one of their nests by mistake … You had to feel sorry for snakes, since they were deaf and all they could do was crawl. When we reached the point where the forest almost crossed the train tracks onto Karel’s meadow … we ran into the red-haired forester in his uniform, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. “Guten Tag,” he took off his hat. “Er hütet den Wald,”
^j
I explained. She was happy to have met someone in the forest who was wearing a uniform. The forester looked at her in a way that made me instantly aware of how he was looking at her … He showed us some places in the ferns and bushes where he had set out fox traps, but also traps for rabbits and bears. He had hidden some fox traps in the ferns and
bushes. “Ich fürchte mich, Bubi,”
^k
she whispered to me … When we came out of the forest, some Gypsies were just then driving a small wagon with a canvas roof over the crossing. Their little horse was hauling bundles and clay pots, and the Gypsy who fixed pots and umbrellas sat on the box … A few little Gypsy kids running behind the wagon raised their arms, “A dinar! Cigarettes, pretty lady!” … Claire was frightened. “Was sagen diese Leute? Ich bitte dich, gehen wir zurück in den Wald!”
^l
 … Sweat was beading up on my forehead and I angrily waved the Gypsies away … I showed her the postman’s handsome house and the even handsomer house of the engineer way out in the fields. And then the house in the turnip patch where the woman had killed her husband. “Ist das möglich? Eine regelrechte Wildnis, nicht wahr?”
^m
she said somewhat apprehensively, but showing excitement. I took her to meet Poldka, who was leaning out the window of her little black house. I introduced her, “Zis is my zister.” Clairi liked Poldka quite a bit. “So habe ich mir immer die Hexen vorgestellt,”
ⁿ
she said … Then I took her to see the spring and to visit both of the elderly sisters who lived on the Krka down from Karel’s place. What pleased her most was that she could chat freely with both of them, and they were so weak that they couldn’t have aroused fear in anyone … Toward evening, when I rode Jožef’s bay past the fence where she and Gisela were picking flowers, it left her speechless. She couldn’t believe
her eyes. “Spring hinunter, sonst beissen dich die Pferde, Bubi,”
^o
she shouted. Everything showed on her broad face as if in a mirror: astonishment … joy … fear … anger. That evening she went outdoors: the barn, the house, the dung heap between. “Mir ist zumute, wie einem Gefangenen, Bubi. Mein Gott, was für ein Einfall … Werde ich am Ende ewig hier leben müssen?”
^p
 … We poured out some oil and lit both of the lanterns … She took the things she had brought with her out of the suitcases. For Gisela a doll that said “mama” and closed its eyes. For me a wind-up frog that croaked and hopped. A steel strongbox for Vati, without any money of course. A round embroidered tablecloth with fringe for mother … decked out in flowers of all colors, embroidered in the very best silk. And my feather bed! Big, white and puffy with the first letters of my name in red. Everything else was gone, but this feather bed remained. Nobody had made it the way they would a tablecloth, a frog, or a doll, at least not that I’d seen … Time itself had delivered it when I had to move from my basket into a bed. It never grew old or went out of fashion. It lasted longer than everything else … and it took me into itself and went with me, and I could count on it warming, enfolding, and protecting me for a long time to come … But when mother put it on the rustic bed, it suddenly occurred to me that I was going to live longer than it … Clairi wanted to keep one of the oil lamps burning till morning … As a result, in its light the sky outside the window remained dark blue all night, almost
transparent … The next morning we were already in Karel’s vineyard in Prečna. We carried the grapes in buckets and tall baskets to a barrel standing on a cart in the road. Clairi carried her grapes in a wash basin … and she wobbled wearing somebody else’s work shoes. She didn’t complain, because the work was just as hard as any other. But something pained her that came from inside. Tears welled up in her eyes without her being aware she was so close to crying. “Warum weinst du?”
^q
I asked. “Ich?”
^r
she said, startled, her mood becoming normal again. The church bells rang noon and Clairi got carried away listening to Vati’s bell. “Ich kann das gar nicht glauben. Daß das wirklich Vatis Glocke ist, wo er doch immer so ein Heide war.”
^s
On Sunday Karel distilled brandy outside his house. Vati, who had come for a one-day visit, drank a good deal of the hot, pure liquid … We watched him use a long beanpole with a net tied to its end to pick the last pears from the tree … He staggered all around the perimeter of its wide crown like a bad tightrope walker. Everyone laughed, even mother. Clairi couldn’t believe it. “So was … daß ich den Vati einmal betrunken sehe …”
^t
The decision had already been made that she would work with him for Elite in Ljubljana. They would both live together in father’s tiny basement room. They would not come back on Sundays to visit, because that would use up too much money. Instead, they would send us a part of their salaries by mail.

F
INALLY THE TIME CAME
for me to start school. I was given a small canvas backpack instead of the briefcase with shoulder straps that all of the other students had. I was as frightened as an animal. One morning I went with Ciril and Ivan through the cornfields out of the village … across a footbridge over the stream … along a footpath that led uphill and then down … through the quarry where the Gypsies camped with their wagons and horses … they were still asleep in the morning, with just their dirty yellow feet jutting out of the tents toward their campfires, which had gone out … From there we followed the path uphill … past the cliff with its chest thrust out … then through willows and birches along the Krka … that part was really nice! Then we climbed up the steep path we had come down on that first night and that led through a tunnel to a wall on the road up above … It took us barely thirty minutes to walk the route that had taken more than two hours to cover on our first night … The school was a gray, square, monotonous building. Like a dirty circus bigtop stretched taut in front of the sky. I could barely see its roof. It was nothing like the mission school in Basel … that red cathedral with towers and a huge clock … Its single classroom was on the top floor just under the roof … a short but wide room with benches of various heights and colors … I sat in the highest bench, which was as high as a pew back, between Ciril and Ivan … The blackboard was white from overuse. The teacher was a Mr. Alojz, a man with wavy blond hair. There was something tomato-like about his round face … Red, sluggish blood. The blond hair curling over his ears and cheeks lent him the aspect of a carrot, too … The pupils were of various ages and sizes … They
half-blocked my view of the blackboard and Mr. Alojz … The place smelled like a barn. Some of the kids lived even farther away than my cousins and me … They had to walk two or three hours each way … After leaving me alone for two months, Teacher Alojz began to work with me seriously … He would call on all of the pupils, big and small, to contribute, to say something … He wrote all the words on the blackboard in big printed letters … which were easy to read … And beneath them a translation. Big and small, young boys and adolescents all had to repeat them together over and over again … in unison, keeping the beat … The first time I spoke up, they laughed, then also the second and third … I opened my mouth wide … acted as though it was about to come out … But nothing did … Not a sound, not a syllable … So I closed my mouth … The experiment had been completed … I was left in peace during the following lessons. “In good time, Lojzek, Lord willing!” Mr. Alojz greeted me during the break. Perhaps he was at his wit’s end, a little bit desperate, but still well intentioned … I felt sorry for him … it got a bit on my nerves when he called on me … Couldn’t he just leave me alone? At last he sensed my fear or resistance and he stopped pushing. I knitted my forehead. I growled when he called on me … I didn’t take my coat off, not even during lessons, because they barely fired up the stove at all. Sometimes I dropped off to sleep if it got too warm in the coat. Ciril and Ivan moved to sit with the older kids, the ones their age. Now I was sitting alone. The others around me would play various games during lessons, but not me. I was no fun. During the break the others would group together in the hallway. They brought their
lunch with them, little bundles containing unpeeled potatoes, corn mush, sometimes beans … They ate at the window alcoves that had views out over town … peasant houses, a peasant church, a wooden bridge. Better a proper village than this sort of town. I was as hungry as a wolf … Mr. Alojz patted me on the shoulder now and then as he walked by, clutching his grade book and papers under his arm … He would whack others with his stick, but not me. I was a kind of guest … It was autumn, so it was rainy and muddy. At home there was a single umbrella, Karel’s … Most often I walked alone to school and back, holding a scrap of an old horse blanket over my head … At noon when I came home by way of the Krka and through the quarry, now and then I would be accosted by the Gypsy kids who otherwise darted back and forth among the older Gypsies out cooking in pots on the fires … In the morning they’d all still been sleeping the sleep of the dead, but now they were full of vigor and ready for battle. They chased me all the way to the footbridge … but they didn’t dare go over the stream … That’s why I would skirt the top of the quarry on the way home. I knew that it would still be a while before mother would cook anything in that round stove, so I looked through the grass for all possible edible saps and grains I could chew on.