Newcomers (32 page)

Then, lastly, we were joined by good-looking Andrej from the most dilapidated house on Jail Lane. Without exception all of us recognized how exceptionally handsome he was. A thin, refined, pale face, small, dark, velvety eyes, and such a small mouth that you couldn’t imagine how he could shove an ordinary spoon in there. What’s more, he always spoke out of the corner of his mouth … almost inaudibly, as if sipping each word … Upstairs in the attic of the courtyard building where he lived with his mother and half-sister in one room, he had an open hallway that got narrower and narrower on account of some big supports, where he hung out whenever he was home alone. In the hallway there was a pantry and a stove with a long pipe attached
to the gutter. His half-sister Neva was a strong, homely young woman who did temporary work as a salesgirl in various stores … his mother, dark-haired with lively eyes, like him, loved singing love arias from operas, popular songs, chansons and hits from musicals. She lived on the pension that she had from her first husband. She knew how to tell every story she’d ever heard, she smoked like a chimney and was forever reading suspense novels that she checked out from the St. Jacob’s library … Here on this rooftop, she once told us, was where the cops chased after Hace, the famous burglar who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. The police climbed up on fire ladders to put him in handcuffs, but he just slid down a gutter downspout and lightning rod and escaped … with a whole bagful of watches and rings … I was excited. I couldn’t look enough at the ridge of that roof and the fat chimney from behind which he was said to have taunted the cops. Now that was a bandit! A real Robin Hood!… Now and then Andrej’s mother and Neva would give me something to eat … their asparagus strudel was especially good … In the mezzanine next to them there was a tiny room where a young whore lived. Andrej’s family had some sort of rights to the room, because they kept their wardrobe and two crates there … Andrej told us how he sometimes looked through the keyhole when she had callers inside. She would dance around in a little ballerina dress, sometimes exposing her breasts. The men would do push-ups on top of her and then throw some money into a basin on the table. Whenever she made too much noise, his mother went after her with a coal shovel. He had even gone after her with a broom once, punishment had to be meted out!… He showed me her little room.
It was like a monastic cell. There was a picture of Mary on top of a cask. Once, he told me, he and I were going to hide in the wardrobe and watch what the little whore did from close up, because the girl didn’t lock her door, she would just fasten a hook on it … and sometimes not even that … the room would gape open all day long so you could go in and out like a breeze …

All six of us together now made for quite a powerful group, even though you couldn’t count on most of them … Marko was too delicate, Franci too much of a wimp, Firant too sneaky, Andrej too handsome to fight without holding anything back, and Ivan too excitable and dimwitted. I just wasn’t sure about Karel. Nobody really had him figured out. Was he brave?… Of all of them I was most attached to the two of them … possibly because our parents did similar work, both families had workshops at home and all three of us constantly had to cut, fold, dampen, crawl on the floor looking for needles, and clean … and we were always decked out with every conceivable thread, yarn, fur, and ribbon … But what mattered was that there were enough of us now that we could attack the Breg dwellers, who were constantly violating our borders on the bridge … Perhaps we were already strong enough to declare war on Žabjak and Trnovo, but for sure we could prevent other armies from making incursions on the embankment … Up in the old castle, for instance, there was a motley rabble living in the semi-dilapidated rooms that were propped up with beams. It was led by Sandi, the scourge of delinquents, who had already been under arrest for robbing an alms box in the cathedral … If we could just organize our defenses like they did! They had a habit of lurking
in the tree branches that jutted over the path and then leaping down on miscreants’ necks like Robin Hood’s merry men. It was in one such attack from above that they jabbed a pocketknife into one kid’s neck … If they caught one of their attackers, their practice was to tie him up to a tree trunk upside down and then take everything that fell out of his pockets … Knights! Then they kicked him from the battlement walk all the way down to Streliška Street at the bottom … Some of their sisters were also part of their gang, and they were nasty, wild, combative girls … They wouldn’t even let grown-ups into the castle, they chased everyone away … nannies with children, school classes that went up with their teachers to have a look at Ljubljana, they sent all of them running …

My idea for the coming battle was this: to use scrap lumber to hammer together swords of various lengths that we could hide in our jackets and trouser legs … fill up some inner tubes with lead … pool everything we had to get some brass knuckles … buy up some popguns for visual effect at a distance … fashion some bows and attach wire to the tips of some toy arrows … In short, to create all the armaments that the others already had. Hammer some nails into shields made from old crates, with the tips pointed out. Change the Prinčič boys’ wagon into both an attack and a supply vehicle for munitions. Equip it with sharpened beanpoles or stakes and then shove the wagon … weighted down with paving stones that the driver would sit on, steering with his legs and wielding a slingshot, while a gunner would be free to throw the stones – downhill toward Žabjak … As the wagon raced down the roadway, the slingshot-armed driver and
the gunner would send stones flying at boys and windows … The wagon would immediately be followed by infantry with slingshots and sabers … This would have the same effect as the English desert tanks at Tripoli, Sidi Barrani, and Benghazi … the infantry would paralyze the enemy exactly the same way the pictures in the newspapers showed Finnish ski patrols turning the Russian assault cavalry, old nags and all, into ice … We began fashioning sabers and learned to fence following the Frenchman’s instructions, we threw stones on the run, and we practiced shooting our slingshots with pots set out as targets. Fencing and throwing did not come easily to Karel: he would hurl a stone across the water or hit a dog with a stick like a girl … Our first battle was with the Breg gang on Cobblers’ Bridge. There weren’t many of them, so it wasn’t a real battle, more of a trial run, our first faltering gropes, during which our swords broke … The real war was still ahead of us and that was with the castle gang. But they must have found out about us and our plans. Maybe Franci had blabbed something to Slavko Škerjanc, a friend of his from the castle, whose mother minded the public toilet underneath the Triple Bridge. Škerjanc helped her out at work and so spent all his days on our territory. They must have found out, because no sooner did we get to the steps leading uphill at the Scarp than they attacked us from behind the old fortress wall as others began racing toward us through the neighboring gardens to the upset shouts of the owners. We sword fought with them up close, then we just clobbered each other with baskets snatched off pegs that we still had in hand, until we finally retreated in the face of their superior strength … However, we did manage to pay the Castle
gang back, if only a little … they showed up on our turf … They were coming along the Ljubljanica from under Cobblers’ Bridge, taking potshots with stones at the fish in the shallow water. Sandi was with them. They were walking in a long, drawn-out single file … from staircase to staircase … He was walking in the middle, wearing his red revolutionary shirt, as always. We shouted and got them to look up … We shrieked that they’d better withdraw from our waters … They shook their heads as though there were flies buzzing around them and went on … Then we started to pelt them with stones and slingshot fire … not straight out, so as to hit them, even though the fatheads deserved it, but just to warn them that we meant business … The paving stones and projectiles struck in front of their column and behind them, sending the water shooting in ten-foot-high fountains up to the steps.… Sandi, who was a true leader, since the bravery or lack of bravery of his crew made no difference to him, pressed forward to get to the steps by the drugstore and climb up, but another, Slavko Škerjanc, one of his sidekicks, turned back toward Cobblers’ Bridge where there was another way up across from the antique stores … We couldn’t under any circumstances let them come up, or else we would pay for it … we had to drive them back upstream, toward Žabjak, the St. Jacob’s bridge, and farther on to where Little Graben empties into the Ljubljanica … to Trnovo. We ran on both sides of the river, on Breg and the Gallus Embankment, past antique dealers yelling at us, over their divans and past their mirrored cabinets, throwing stones at all the staircases. I knew that if they got a chance to poke their heads over the top, that would be it for my army … Now we waited for the
payback, their revenge. I believed that we had to beat them to it … We had to attack the castle before they could launch their offensive …

O
NE DAY
Vati unexpectedly received from the Swiss authorities the money that was left after they confiscated his property in Basel and settled his debts … There it wouldn’t have amounted to much money, but here it was a lot … Vati began making plans to start over again, from the ground up, so to speak … Despite the fact that we’d been living in the center of town for quite a few months, and despite all his advertising, the business refused to get off the ground … He could count the customers who had walked in our door on the fingers of one hand. Mrs. Hamman, one or two friends of hers, Sergeant Mitič and the wives of other NCOs … But those were just repairs – blowing the fur, as they called it, to see where the piece was worn down or deficient … No serious orders. A fur coat. Or a whole outfit: a fur hat, a stole, and a muff … A jacket or a vest … “Die Leute haben kein Verständnis mehr, kein Gefühl für wirklich schöne Dinge,” mother lamented. “Sie schätzen die feinen, ganz handgearbeiteten Dinge nicht mehr nach Gebühr … Man interessiert sich nur für den verkommenen maschinengezeugten Kram …”
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In the display windows of the six or eight furriers in town … Eberle, Rot, or on the square, you could see yards and yards of muffs, fur hats, little caps. Miles and
miles of them! And fur coats on mannequins! Always different and new, a regular multitude. The junk that mother saw that was quickly stitched together by machine not only made her sad, it gave her stomach cramps … And we continued to eat badly. Rice made a hundred different ways … steamed, with peas and milk … There was no butter on the bread … maybe once a month some beef soup … twice a week a little, thin disk of salami … macaroni mixed with egg, just one of course …

Vati was making his plans: to become a supplier of hides. He was thinking of building a rabbit farm. Rabbits of all different colors and breeds. Silver, Russian, angora, and silk … He would build his farm in Polica on Uncle Janez’s property. We didn’t know him yet. It was near Ljubljana. The gray fur of Russians, resembling chinchilla, for overcoats and jackets, and wavy angoran like yarn for children’s outfits … We would have the furs and the meat, to boot … Mother and Clairi were against it … Mother kept vigilant against flights of fancy. A farm like that would be exposed to all kinds of opportunities for theft. And somebody would have to look after it. And then there was the expense of the hutches!… you couldn’t just leave the rabbits out in a field or the woods. Then there was food for the rabbits, a special kind of bark, these rodents had an insatiable appetite … We have to think very carefully. It would be better to invest the money … But Vati kept pushing. I wrote in his name to Uncle Rudi in Polica that we would be coming for a visit on Sunday. We took the train to Grosuplje and from there we walked through a quarry and a road that ran through some fields … which I hadn’t seen or smelled in a long time. It was like an outing …

Uncle Rudi was a short, broad-shouldered man who bore some resemblance to Uncle Jožef, but wasn’t as caustic. He would ride his bicycle to Ljubljana and in the winters did road maintenance work in nearby Grosuplje. His house stood on a small hill with a winding path leading up to it like the kind in picture books … He had a number of children, including some girls, and one of the boys was my age … They were poorer than Karel and Jože, but they were nicer. They had just one cow, two pigs and a few hens. Their fields were all on the hillside … But their barn was magnificent. The straw was hard and smooth and we could slide down it like a lumber chute, then tumble down the slope outside the door … Vati chatted with Rudi about his interest in building some hutches on his property and buying some rabbits … Uncle Ivan was for the idea … We got a basket of fruit, lard, and some flour to take home …

The train was overflowing with drunk and happy men and women … There were so many of them that they sat on the floor between benches, in the corridor, outside the lavatory … All of them were carrying bags, suitcases, backpacks, bundles, and wicker baskets … with corn, beans, barley, sausage, and chickens … “Well, boy, I’m going to need to empty my bladder here in a second,” an excited little man kindly put his hand on my head. I drew in my legs so he could shove his way through to the toilet … People were singing in the compartments … including the women, flushed red, their shiny faces with necklaces that got lost in the fat folds of their pendulous dewlaps … I had never before liked people so much as I did on that train. Every compartment had its own song, or several compartments
would share one … The luggage racks practically shook from the basses and sopranos and things fell down in our laps … In the compartment next door people were of course talking about that … the willy and wee-wee. That was interesting … “Me, no longer able to do it?” cackled a man’s bass. “Even after three score years she isn’t satisfied … Now when I get home, she’ll start whining … like you wouldn’t believe. I’ll tell her, look, here’s a news flash. When I leave in the morning, you get one kiss, so in thirty days that’s thirty kisses and after dinner I’ll slap your bottom, another thirty per month, so that’s thirty kisses and thirty slaps on the ass all together … whoever wants more won’t get any, that’s bolshevism, skinning a man alive …” … “Ha ha ha!” … “Score, one-zero, my favor!” On the platform of the last car where you had a good view of the tracks as they narrowed on the gray granite ballast the farther away they got, the happiest people on the whole train were shouting and playing an accordion …