Newcomers (2 page)

V
ATI WAS SITTING BY THE WINDOW
, with nothing to do of course, so he either looked out or dozed. Mother was still completely beside herself … red in the face and neck, she kept fidgeting … but thank God she was no longer complaining or whining. Our luggage, which had formerly been kept in the attic, was stowed on shelves up above:
there were several brown and gray canvas bags with rusted corner pieces, a round carrying case made of shiny black leather, two cardboard suitcases and one made out of wicker. Gisela was sleeping with her head on a small comforter and her overcoat for a blanket. Mother offered me a slice of home-baked apricot bread on a napkin … I didn’t feel like it, I was more thirsty. “Iß, sonst wird’s dir schlecht.”
^*
I ate one, two, three slices and then stretched out on the seat next to Vati. I didn’t want to rest my head on his knees, because I knew how he stank of fur down there, but also how uncomfortable my head would be. The gentleman from the corridor with the frigate on his watch sat and talked with both of them for a while. Was he Italian or French?

“Nach dreißig Jahren Leben in der Schweiz haben sie uns hinausgeworfen,”
^†
Vati blurted out … and what other voice came next, but mother’s … here came the tears down her nose, and again I felt ashamed for her. Oh, I knew all of her reproaches by heart, even if I didn’t understand all of them … Vati turned attentively toward the dandified man.

“Das macht der Krinneg,”
^‡
the visitor answered thoughtfully. “Wenn es nicht die Gefahr von Krieg gäbe, wäre die Auslassung aus der Schweiz niemals passiert.”
^§

“Ach, wenn wir doch damals, in den zwanziger Jahren die schweizerische Staatsbürgerschaft angenommen hätten. Aber mein Mann wollte seine Länder zurück … Bis wohin fahren Sie mit uns?”
^‖

“Bis zu der Grenze,”
^a
the gentleman said. He was the one who had locked the compartment door and had a key to the whole train car in his pocket.

They woke me up in the night with the electric light bathing the compartment in yellow. “Schnell, schnell, wach auf,” Vati said as I sank back into a pleated sort of sleep. He took hold of me and set me on my feet. I raised my arms over my head and fell to the floor. Gisela was already wrapped in a blanket and sleeping on mother’s shoulder. The gentleman was standing outside the train car. They hurriedly dressed me in my sailor’s coat with the anchor. Outside nothing was visible through the watery darkness except for some lights. I jumped from the high door out into the drizzly rain. We ran from the train that had brought us across tracks and ties that looked like ladders scattered over the gravel ballast. Mother ran with Gisela across a track toward a long, dimly lit roof. Vati was hurrying with me, pressing one of my hands to the handles of two suitcases he was carrying, because in the other he was carrying two more, while I had the round one in my other hand. Mother was shouting back at us, worried crazy as usual … In the light of the locomotive the rain turned into Christmas tree tinsel. The roof turned out to be a station with posters and numbers, but no people.
Mother sat on a black iron bench holding Gisela in her arms, who was awake now and had the eyes of an ermine … Vati, accompanied by a gentleman disappeared into some black hole, because he had to take care of something with our green travel booklets. I was freezing. It was strange, that same day I’d been knocking around Basel. When I got to Barfüßerplatz across from Gerbergässli, Gritli had called to me from the other side. At first I thought she was trying to trick me, as she had often done to get me to go home. But this time she was shouting in such an urgent voice and with such an earnest face, even after a streetcar came between us, that I finally ran across the street on my own … She didn’t slap me, she didn’t touch me at all. Outside our building there was a policeman in a short cape. On the other side of the door there was chaos and running around, and suitcases were lined up one after the other on the steps, as though they’d walked out of the room on their own … “Schnell, schnell,” mother shouted from upstairs. “Wasche dich, wir fahren nach Jugoslawien.”
^b
 … Had I heard right? Was that even possible?… They literally ripped the clothes off of me, causing the buttons to fly, tossed me into the bathtub, soaped me up and scrubbed me so hard I had scratches, dried me with a towel, and dressed me in white … in a shirt with buttons that I tucked into my shorts. All the rooms – the workshop, the showroom, the salesroom – were full of strange gentlemen, plainclothes policemen, some of whom looked like businessmen and others like dancers, walking back and forth holding papers, writing things down, counting on
their fingers and pushing us the whole time, “Schnell! Schnell!” We walked to the train station with our luggage, accompanied by two uniformed policemen and two in plain clothes. It was so hot that we all had dark spots on our clothes from sweating … At the station a nurse with a red cross on her cap met us. She wanted to take Gisela and me to the dispensary for coffee with milk, because we hadn’t had lunch. “Nein, das erlaube ich nicht,”
^c
said mother. Lots of people crowded around … Mother held me by the hand and refused to let me go … but the nurse pleaded with her and gently took hold of me by the shoulder. Finally, with Gisela in her arms, mother went with me into a sooty office where the huge black plate of a locomotive loomed right outside the window. The nurse pushed a cup of gray-white coffee across the table … Mother picked it up with her left hand and tried it. “Ein schlechter, lauer Kaffee,”
^d
she said. The nurse gave me a friendly nod. I knew that when adults were this nice it wasn’t right for children to turn down whatever they offered or else they could suddenly get angry. There was a gray membrane floating on top of the coffee. I took a swallow and a revolting, cold slime slid down my throat … I couldn’t get it down or out … I spat it back out into the coffee. I set the cup down and climbed out of the chair, regretting that I couldn’t oblige myself for the sake of the nurse. Vati arrived with the papers and black booklets that had little windows in them for our names. Finally we boarded the train, where I spent the whole time standing
by a window. Mother of course was crying and complaining, which made me draw in my head and wish I could hide. The policemen and two gentlemen showed us the compartment we would be traveling in. They stood at the doors at both ends of the car, and there was a policeman in the corridor too … until the conductor came and locked the compartment. The train stood fairly far out from the main building and it wasn’t until it began to move that Clairi and Gritli appeared on the platform, both of them dressed like mother in white dresses and broad white hats. “Warum fahren sie nicht mit uns?”
^e
I asked mother. “Clairi kommt später, das Gritli bleibt und wird alles machen bei den Behörden, daß wir zurückkommen.”
^f
So we can come back? No, I don’t think so … Mother wept and kept casting looks at father as though he were some sort of lizard or crocodile. My sisters waved to us from next to a pillar. Clairi, Gisela’s mother, I liked better because she was always sad, but I looked at Margrit, who was mean, because she had begun to interest me more and more … As I was standing next to a pillar now, everything that had happened seemed as colorful and abrupt as in some comic strip … Despite the scrubbing, my fingernails were still black from the dirt and sand I’d been playing in by the water under the cliff … Vati came running alone out of the black hole and shouted, “Da ist der richtige Zug!”
^g
as he pointed toward the headlights of a locomotive that was puffing in the rain, “woo-woo-woo” …

The car we got into was empty, cold, and poorly lit. There were no compartments so we could be together as at home, just benches on either side beneath baggage racks that looked like bird feeders … and it smelled vaguely of the toilet. It resembled an empty, unheated room. Little white porcelain markers were attached to the windows and doors. The black, arched letters on them resembled drawings of hummingbirds, frogs, and crabs. Except for the vowels, I couldn’t make out a single letter or a complete word in a language I knew. Mother tried to read them – father, too – but with no success. I went to the far end of the car, which was in semi-darkness, so I could take its full measure from door to door, but mother, who had been soaked through by the rain, shouted at me so loudly to come back immediately that I hurried to take my seat next to Vati, because if she shouted again something in the car was bound to explode. Outside the windows there was nothing but blackest rain … Without any ado, blowing of whistles or shouting of railway men, and without my noticing it, the train had begun to move … Through the rain and the dark, its black windowpanes covered with millions of raindrops … It pushed into the tracks with its wheels, as though it were kneeling, then its shock absorbers collided with something, and then it was pushing into the tracks again … The car leaned out to one side and repeated this motion several times and each time it did, I didn’t know if I could move up or down its steep incline without the car breaking in half or my weight causing an accident … A narrow caged door kept opening and closing by itself … nothing was visible through it, except for darkness and some toilet paper on the floor, crumpled and filthy, a whole roll of it,
a regular paper garland, like in the boys’ bathroom at school. The floor didn’t have rows of tiny gutters like the car on the train from Basel, it consisted of ordinary wooden floorboards. This fact bothered me, as though they’d removed something essential for the operation of the train … In the windows I could see dim reflections of the benches, the poles and the shapeless white mass of my own figure … I went straight toward myself and pressed my face to the window … to see what I was like since I’d been traveling … I couldn’t see, but I could sense that it was still pretty much me … though blurred, so that I could have taken the image for some counterfeit or substitute for myself … For a tenth of a second I felt uncertain and would have liked to send my ghost to check where I was … inside the train or stuck somewhere out there, flitting through an unknown land … I turned away perplexed, because I couldn’t make out if something had happened to me or if I really was someone else … Did this strange train car have any connection at all with the locomotive, the tracks, the railway, the ventilators on the roof … I knew trains well, every Christmas I got a new one, which I would immediately disassemble down to its motor … It was moving, all right … lost in the darkness, but neither over the earth nor through the sky … so where, then?… it had to be racing toward the place where there were lots of animals in the barns … horses, cows, colts, calves … red boats and little biplanes for doing aerial stunts … I looked at my legs jutting out of my shorts. Sometimes I was amazed I was still so little and hadn’t grown up yet … and sometimes I got angry that parts of me were growing so fast and gawkily, and that I wasn’t a child anymore … Fortunately my family was sitting at the
other end of the car … mother in her white hat, which she’d put on over a kerchief, Gisela covered with her little overcoat, Vati with his long graying hair and dandruff on the collar of his blue suit … they were sitting there as if in one of our rooms at home … and for an instant I sensed that this image would stay with me forever … It occurred to me to go check the time on Vati’s watch. It was ten. We had left Basel at one. “Wie komisch das ist … vor neun Stunden waren wir noch in Basel,”
^h
I said. Father’s lips stretched out in a smile. Mother was turned away, scratching a corner of her mouth with her index finger. Oh, these two were never going to get along if they couldn’t come together on such a nice trip … I had never seen Vati at rest before … in a train, outdoors, on a streetcar … except for once in the sanatorium when he took me there and then came back and fetched me, in the zoo, and on rue de la Couronne … He sat holding his hands between his knees because it was cold, his eyes blinking behind his glasses. Then he got up and went to the bench behind me. He took off his shoes, wiped his feet with the newspaper and then stretched his legs out on the bench. “Dort ist es schmutzig,”
ⁱ
mother said. Vati lay his head on the arm rest. He had made a pillow for himself out of the
Basler Nachrichten
, put his glasses into their case and covered himself with his coat, so that he now vanished. Nobody was inclined to say anything unusual or amusing. I climbed up on my knees and stretched out on the bench the length of the backrest, on the other side of which he
lay. Mother covered me with a coat and tucked a scarf under my head. I could just feel the warmth of my body or of the coat where it covered my face without warming the cold air above me. Although the whole car was ours, with only our luggage on the racks up above, the train chugging and racing, I was spellbound by the blue, dreamlike lights above me … and wished I could be, if only for the short time it took me to fall asleep, back in my bed in Basel, under that fluffy comforter of mine … Mother was dozing in the corner with a scarf on her head and her hat pushed down over her eyes, and Gisela lay in the hollow of her lap, while Vati had begun snoring, invisible on the other side of the bench.