Newcomers (29 page)

Then, after the big news that had struck everyone like an axe to the head, the newspaper wrote: Blitzkrieg … Germany attacks Poland … A photo showed Polish cavalry consisting of white-clad horsemen with lances attacking German tanks … Bombardments. Stukas. Two pursuit aircraft flying over Warsaw … The Germans dismantling a border crossing … Germany gained 190,000 square kilometers, the Soviet Union 180,000 … of Poland … Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, but they didn’t help Poland … Vati and I went to Šiška to sell furs to a merchant who had a house near a train crossing … His pink round house with columns and a grocery store on the ground floor stood on a corner … upstairs the merchant had his nice home: a big living room with oil paintings in frames. While Vati and he were talking, his son Oto and I played tag all through the house … up and down the steps that wound like a snail shell … outside in their yard, with bags and crates lying around … among the columns that we designated as home … Nobody scolded us, nobody shouted … Oto walked into the store … bottles of champagne, fish, foie gras in
mayonnaise lined up on the shelves and in the display cases … He took a tall jar of chocolate candies off of a shelf and gave me a whole handful … the saleswomen stood by with their hands behind their backs and didn’t even say “boo” … It was immediately apparent that, when his father wasn’t around, Oto represented the owner here … That’s how I would have liked to live … have a well-stocked grocery store several paces away where I could go whenever I felt like it and take whatever I wanted … The merchant was still a young man and serious. “What had to happen has happened,” he said to Vati. He pointed down to his courtyard where the bags and crates were. “Now at least for a while my people need to keep their mouths shut …”

We moved after ten p.m. when the streetcars ran less frequently and there were no gawkers out in the street to make fun of our meager worldly possessions … So long, faucet and old witch! So long, Mrs. Guček! Tobacconist lady!… Goodbye, Jože! Mr. Ham! Zdravko!… We moved using a cart that Mrs. Hamman had loaned us … the tables, the hammocks, the chairs, the wicker chest, the boxes, the sewing machine, the bunches of patterns, the box with pots and eating utensils … We had accumulated quite a bit … We had to make three trips there and back … Carrying our clothes, bedsheets and Gisela, Clairi and mother walked on the sidewalk behind Vati and me as we pushed the cart … When we arrived in the vaulted entryway of the wide house, which had a glass-enclosed porch framed in white-painted wood as part of its facade, and began to carry our things up the dark staircase and then down the long, squeaky courtyard veranda protected by a glass roof and metal poles (there in the corner was where
old Mrs. Hamman lived), through a vestibule into a big, empty room with two windows that faced out onto Town Square, from which a streetlight cast a dim glow onto the dark parquet floor, where we set each item carefully down, to avoid hurting our hands, but also so they wouldn’t drop and wake up the people who lived in the house … I remembered similar moves that we’d made in Basel … from the green house in Gerbergässli to the ruin that we lived in in Steinenvorstadt, from there to the Rue de Bourg alongside an arcade you could take to get to the Rhine … from there to beautiful rue Helder with its fountain in the middle of the road, and then from there to the square near the Mission school and finally back to the green house in Gerbergässli …

In the darkness we used matches to quickly inspect the apartment … From the veranda a glass door led up steps to a long, cold, high-ceilinged room where the red plaster was peeling … A bit farther on, under a vault, was the true, legal entrance to the apartment, a door with a window that was covered with waxed paper printed with roses … First was a dark hallway … the kitchen with a gas stove to the left, and on the right that big red room and next to it a spacious cave for the bathroom with no tub … Then there were two doors … between the first and the second was an antechamber with built-in cupboards … which led into the big room where we set our things down … Outside the windows there were cables, the trolley ran here … Each of the houses on the right and left sides of the square had at least one shop in it … This reminded me of the house I was born in on Elisabethplatz.

I
SPENT THE FIRST FEW DAYS LEANING
against the window … As a trolley went by, the wires tautened all down the street … On the other side there were shops: Zos’s for ready to wear and shoes with a little arcade in the middle … A delicatessen, a barber, a hairdresser, the Fischer grocery store with its cardboard parrot on the door … A tobacco shop and the Šmalc variety store with its corner of black marble … A goldsmith and watchmaker … A fur store, housed in a palazzo of mirror-like marble. The Shmied department store … Everything, from the doormats to the door handles, was elegant. The stores were all lined up one next to the other so that you didn’t so much walk as fly down the sidewalk … But nowhere was there a single patch of greenery or dirt for me to spit into. Day after day around here I was constantly going to have to wear nice clothes and well-polished shoes. All I had to do was remember the Sava, its gravel riverbed, the fields, the airport and my throat would constrict. When I leaned so far out over the ledge that I nearly fell, on the top edge of the “Hamman” shop sign I could see the pigeons padding back and forth over the letters and cocking their heads to the side to look up at me … This also reminded me of the Elisabethplatz in Basel, and the window where they used to carry me as a baby to look out at the street, the people, the children, and the pigeons on the window ledge. With all my horizontal weight I could sense that the raucous little creatures weren’t any danger … Now I was suddenly there again, looking out on a city square with its crush of stores, and the pigeons were once more keeping track of my behavior, as they had on Elisabeth Square. They looked at me appraisingly, as if assessing what and how many things
were going to happen to me here in this new environment. I felt as though I were locked up in a classroom or a hospital ward … I made myself quieter and less obtrusive than the window panes, in order to make out from their cooing as many of the good and bad things that awaited me here as possible, and not miss any of their predictions, particularly not the bad ones … They would scatter at a loud noise, fly up over the wires and then perch on the windows opposite, so that I couldn’t make them out any more, or new ones would land, with other prophecies, warnings and news …

I didn’t dare go out in the street. There wasn’t any decent company for me out there that I could discern, anyway … I played with Gisela. We played telephone: I unwound a spool of twine, running it from the main room to the other, long, high-ceilinged one near the courtyard that had plaster crumbling off its walls. Shoe polish tins served as our speakers and receivers … I stretched a sheet out in the corner by the stove and made a tent for us that was so high and spacious that I could lead her around on her wagon under our big top, and still we were hidden from the adults. We played button store and staged a mass on the wicker chest. We also performed a play and various farces for the adults in the doorway to the antechamber. We dressed in mother’s clothes, put on Clairi’s shoes, adorned ourselves with chokers, fur hats and muffs, and painted our cheeks with rouge. Gisela participated in all of it with lively enthusiasm. We told funny stories, played pantomime, and tumbled all over each other … Gisela’s pale, little down-etched face and silky brown hair were made to order for the role of a princess … But gradually I got tired of these contrived entertainments …

At last I summoned some courage and went out to stand in front of our glass apartment door. It had been pasted over with waxed paper that had a checked pattern with red roses. Just like the distinguished doors of affluent residents! There was a small space outside the door. The vaulted exit led on one side to the courtyard veranda, and on the other it led up a polished stairway to the apartment of the mysterious Mrs. Hamman … Sometimes we ran into her … A big, powerful woman with charcoal eyes and black, wavy hair. With something rigid inside her … She would stop in the middle of the stairway under the vault and shout orders back upstairs … to her cook or her maid in German and Slovene … At times she was accompanied by a businessman in a black necktie and green hat, occasionally even by two of them, who wore the same kind of ties and green hats and almost had to run to keep up with her … One time it would look like the lady was following their lead, and the next as though they were obeying her … There was no way of making that out … I always managed to do a sort of double double-take whenever I saw her. The first on account of her beauty and elegant clothing and capes flapping behind her, and the second at the resolve and nonchalance that she showed to the world … I didn’t know whether to greet her with “Good morning, ma’am” or “Grüß Gott, gnädige Frau.” So I greeted her with a bow. Once she bowed buoyantly back at me, but mostly she just hurried on out of the house, her jaw clenched tight.

Here, at the short end of the courtyard veranda, was also where the nice old lady lived, her mother, who had given me a copy of
Die schönen illustrierten Abenteuer
a year before. What wouldn’t I have given
to be able to have another look at those guns engraved with the years of manufacture, or the collections of sabers and shields on her wall … and run my hands over those objects from noble times that I could only fantasize about … One day I ran into her just as she was airing some rugs out on the veranda, each of them bearing its own noble coat of arms … She was standing beside them, leaning on her cane and smoking out of a long mouthpiece. Her white-haired head, refined face, hooplike bracelet reminiscent of cells in a castle dungeon … and the cane with its beak-like silver handle on which she was leaning … all of it literally etched itself into me … It brought to life for me images of palaces atop cliffs in olden days … even those times of the rich past in which Vati, mother, Clairi and Margrit had lived and which for me were only a fairy tale, like everything that had been in the world before I was born … I said hello to her with all the awe that informed me … humbly, placing my hand on my heart, the way real esquires showed respect to their ladies … Oh, how I hoped she would one day invite me into her chambers …! She greeted me back with a strong, goodhearted nod, which sufficed for the moment, as her good will enfolded me like a veil beneath which I would either perish or take flight …

The veranda ran all around the rectangular courtyard, above which the trees of castle hill inclined, their bushy crowns and powerful trunks descending from the castle onto Hamman’s Dry Cleaning, Pressing and Alterations like a primeval forest … Through the long glass pane of the workroom, only the bottom half of which was frosted, I could see the laundresses, seamstresses and female assistants, all wearing caps and white work smocks. Sometimes they sang in chorus, as if up
in a choir loft … Beneath its glass roof the veranda would squeak and rattle noisily whenever anyone walked on it, and the girls would lift their heads and look out over the frosted glass to see who was there. If it was me, I turned red as a beet and took off like a madman … A glass-enclosed porch hung like a basket on the wall at a right angle to the veranda. Various gentlemen and ladies would walk around and take their seats in armchairs inside it. They had eyes that they used to observe the courtyard, although they were different from the knobby eyes of the workwomen … Thus there was no refuge for me on the veranda, because you could never be alone and completely free there …

The best thing to do was get away from there … Through a wide exit doorway you came into a square hallway with doors surrounding oleanders in the corners and a rug in the middle. Thank god, it was quiet and dark there … Here at last was the vaulted door to the staircase, illuminated by real streetlights protected in wire mesh. The wide, eroded steps made a sharp turn as they followed the thick wall … That’s why I always descended them carefully or shot down like a bomb … A sunny day with street noise shone into the vaulted entryway through the wide door, only one side of which was opened inward. I stood there for a while and looked at the people … all conceivable types were walking across the square as though in a live toy box of figurines … I felt drawn outside … Next to the door was the goldsmith’s and a lamp store, then the clothes designer’s studio and a shoe store, then an optician who also sold binoculars, and then the Rot fur store. That one I knew. I stood outside its display window, hoping to see the
tall blonde lady who aroused my desire, but I couldn’t find her. After that came city hall with its gigantic striped poles for flags on each side of its entrance. There was a statue on its steps: a short-maned, stocky horse ridden by the old King Peter I as he fled into the mountains of Albania … Both of them had been fashioned in rough curves out of gray rock … The handsome old king in the same sort of army cap as any Serbian soldier would wear was so alien in this environment … city hall, the square, the whole town, it might as well have been the statue of an Apache chief here on the steps … This startled and made me feel uncomfortable, because the old king’s face was so noble that I liked him immediately … Behind the barred windows of city hall were those cannon and mortars from the first World War that I had already looked at before. If the gate was open, I would slip into the cool, dark entryway to feel their barrels and carriages like hay carts on wooden wheels and the soft, still-oily bundles of rags on their ramrods … Beyond that of course was the cathedral … then a florist’s shop, and the Falcon and Spinning Wheel Inn … an old man, a junkman who sold odds and ends in display cases in the entryway … buttons, children’s watches, toothpaste, shoelaces, scarves, the board game
Mensch, ärgere dich nicht
, yoyos, belts … I’d already been to Šenklavž’s, also to Krisper’s, that time when I went begging with Mirko and his mother. I was careful not to let any of the sales staff recognize me. Then there was yet another furrier in a narrow building, a regular palace built out of black marble … The elegance of the street … the artificial flowers, the toys, the pretty odds and ends in the display windows, the neckties on shirts, the veils, mountains of hams with parsley, wigs of all different
colors … practically lifted me off the ground, so that I could scarcely feel myself anymore and it seemed I could swim through this ocean of silk, necklaces, fine shoes, gold cufflinks … Town Square ended where the buildings got narrower and Old Square began … which was dark, crowded and grim. I didn’t go there … Here, on the border between the two squares, a barber was standing outside his diminutive barbershop with an outsized copper plate for a shop sign hanging over his head … Here was also the sign with the red Turk smoking a hookah … Here porters with braids over their shoulders and numbered tin badges on their caps waited for work … here a swarthy shoe shine man crouched behind a mirrored box, a brush and open tin of shoe polish in hand … The bridge that went over the Ljubljanica was called the Cobblers’ Bridge, it was white and had handsome lamps on it. The path that followed the river was called the Gallus Embankment … This is where the antique stores were all lined up, with rummage in their windows, their doorways, out on the street … Furniture, nails, mattresses, pots, cast-iron stoves, radios, flower stands. All of it old, disgusting junk that repelled me. Gargoyles of cast lead in the window and in boxes arrayed along benches, in front of them dragons, phantoms and devils … Everything great or small was inside in the windows or outside and under the chestnut trees … The antique dealers, women and men and their children, sat on stools, armchairs, beds and divans that they were also trying to sell. I wanted to figure out if these city kids were anything like the ones in Basel … if they were better or smarter than the peasant kids in Lower Carniola, or in Nove Jarše for that matter … I went from face to face, searching. Here was one like
Anka, but too chubby and done up. Farther down from the chestnuts in a vacant sandy lot some boys were kicking a ball … They were too self-contained a group for me to be able to join them. I was drawn to some sabers and old mortars displayed in the windows, along with knives, swords in ornate sheaths … armor, lances, helmets with steel face guards … If only one of those things could have been mine … But the antique dealers kept an eye on everything and gave me dirty looks, as though they’d guessed my intentions … Around here, I concluded, there was no chance of finding company or making friends … The neighborhood was too gussied up, but also quite desolate … I went back along the wall toward the bridge … There were several trees in the sand … Carts leaned up against the wall … the wide iron gate of a warehouse … The Ljubljanica flowed lazily between its high walls. The whole of it wouldn’t have made up for one single branch of the Sava, its gravelly riverbed, the woods, the potato fields near the airport … I didn’t come across a single scamp my age anywhere … I walked down short, narrow Locksmith Lane, between an inn and a warehouse which exuded a stench of dampness, rotten fruit, paper and old dirt, with flies swarming around …