Newcomers (9 page)

We hit the trail as we had the night before … going past a white house with a brand new red roof. The same flowers that grew in the meadows were in various big pots and glasses at the foot of the cross. Except they had faded. It was strange that they picked flowers that grew in such numbers at Jesus’s feet anyway … And even stranger that they let them fade when they could have put fresh ones in the glasses each day … At the railroad crossing I paused in the middle of the tracks: on one side they led from where we had just come from, and on the other side they curved along the high gravel trackbed and headed into the black forest … After the crossing the path rose … with houses built along the slope. Simple, unadorned, white … A little black house made of straw stood slightly set back from the path. “Da lebt eine alte Närrin, wie der Karel erzählt,” I heard Vati say. “Ihr ganzer Kram liegt vor dem Haus.”
^§
 … It consisted of a box and a colorful heap of rags, with not even a chair … Ciril and Ivan were
walking on either side of me. I wanted to be polite … but it’s hard to connect with boys your same age when you can’t talk or play some game … I pointed at the forest that the train had passed through … at the iron weathercock on a roof … and at a neat wooden garden hut in the distance. Both of them nodded, adjusted their hats over their black hair, bent down because I was shorter, laughed … In their hip pockets they had something interesting … a fat rubber band, a kind of sling, like David’s, on a sturdy cleft stick. They picked up a stone, pulled back the rubber band and … ping! it went flying straight into a snipe that had been perched on the mossy roof of the crazy woman’s house … As handsome as they were, and as honest and decent as they may have been, they knew all the tricks … What would it be like? Would we really become friends?… Along both sides of the path lay carpets of furrowed black earth. We walked past several wooden structures that had carts and ladders standing beside them. On the road there were a number of men, peasants like Uncle Karel, only shaggier, with pitchforks and shovels in hand, but friendly, I thought. Also old women in dense layered dresses and scarves, like our aunt, but minus the bundled-up feet and the pustules … Untroubled faces, dark furrows. Some brown stinking rivulet, liquid manure, trickled right down the path … and huge heaps of black, stinking leaves stood in front of each house. A white hen was waddling along the top of a fence above a pool of filthy urine. Yellow chicks like the ones we’d get for Easter, but alive, were chirping. No one paid any attention to them except Gisela and me, but mother called us back so we wouldn’t fall into any manure. Now we could see that garden cottage from a bit
closer up and next to it a house with big windows. That was probably where city people had to live.

T
HIS LATTER TURNED OUT
to be Uncle Jožef’s house. On one side it was as tall as a castle … and that’s where an enormous dung heap stood and where you entered the house by stone steps to the right or left. On the other side the house was like any other little house with small doors and windows, just like Karel’s. It had a wide entryway with a stove and a fat pillar in the middle. This was the house Vati was born in. A lot of people had gathered in the main room. I felt bashful and didn’t know how I was supposed to behave. There were several holy paintings on the wall, just like at Karel’s house. Jesus, Mary, Joseph and lots of other saints with little lambs. A little white porcelain Mary wearing a blue shawl hung by the door. Instead of legs she had a little dish with water, which sent a sudden jolt through my hips … Paper flowers and green branches had been tucked in around the cross. There were photographs hanging on the wall between the two small windows. “Deine beiden Onkel, die in Amerika leben,”
^*
said Vati. These were two portly gentlemen, wearing floral silk vests and with watches on chains, who were standing on a shaggy rug. Next to them in a round frame were Vati’s father and mother. If I look at them long enough, I thought, I’ll learn something. I always did that with pictures. “Meine
Mutter, als sie starb,”
^†
Vati pointed to another one. In this last, long picture my grandmother was lying dead in her coffin, beneath a lace veil and covered from her feet up to her folded hands with icons of saints … Jesus, Mary and one other, a monk in a brown habit who was holding the baby Jesus in his arms.

“Bubi! Bubi!” they called me to the table. I was flushed red with embarrassment. Uncle Jožef sat at the center of the table. He was thin, with white hair and a mustache. The eyes under his splotchy forehead were harshly blue and when he smiled, it wasn’t exactly innocent mirth that showed in them. He was wearing a hat. When he got up, he turned out to be small and his long gray trousers were short enough even for me to wear. His wife was gray and tiny, with a mouth as wide as the slot on a piggy bank. I also had three female cousins at the table. The oldest was big, powerful Minka who had studied to become a postal employee … pretty, dark-haired Stanka who had blue eyes and dazzling teeth and was so attractive she seemed almost magnetic … and the last was little Anica, who was perhaps a year younger than me … long-legged and skinny-armed, wearing a dirty red skirt … as barefoot as a chicken and completely unkempt.

Anica, Ciril, and Ivan took me through a tall door to some steps leading out of the house. They were grinning like crazy … with their eyes, their skin, their hair. We came out onto a stony slope leading downward with a tall, narrow barn made of stone. Inside it were three glorious horses. A gray, that was slightly dappled and two bays with
extremely high-set tails and such shaggy legs that they looked like they were wearing muffs … So these were the horses I was going to ride. Just get me saddles, stirrups, and tournament dress for over their bellies. And some plumes for their heads. Armor. All set to ride over the drawbridge into the castle … You hurl a gigantic spear … all the way to the altar in the castle’s chapel, where your enemy kneels, the black prince, begging for his life … Then the battle is won and bells announce my victory in war … In a wooden barn next to it there were a lot more chickens than there were at Karel’s … its floor practically billowed from the abundance of feathers … Then there were some big pigs in a wide pen … and some little wooden slat coops where some white geese and those funny coral-colored ducks lived. Who would have thought! Just past the dung heap the meadow began, hanging gently like a sheet over a hollow that stretched from the house down to the road at the foot of a hill. And here at the edge of the meadow was a little building made out of nothing but timbers and full of rummage. My cousins and Anica just opened its door … and pointed, without saying anything, and if they had, I wouldn’t have understood them anyway … All I had to do was look at their eyes and their laughter. There was a tiny round hut way up at the top of a long pole, with cooing sounds coming out of it. Pigeons. Domestic ones … white, fat, and handsome … handsomer than in Basel along the Rhine, or in front of the city hall … Covered with dots, they came out of their opening, flew down onto the roof of the little building and then back home … So these cousins and uncles of mine must be good people, I concluded. There was a wooden building in the middle of the meadow.
“Hay barn,” they said. Up above it was full of dried grass, while down below there were carts with sides made of slats, lined up one after the other. And a real coach, the kind that princesses ride in, that was yellowish brown, with lanterns on each side. My cousins showed me how to climb up the struts. Anica climbed like a squirrel … and when she was standing on the strut above me, I noticed she didn’t have underpants on … That excited me and I thought I was dreaming. The barn was on the lower side of the house. In addition to cows, black and brown smoky grays, there was also a bull and a calf. Then they were called back to the house … all three of them had to run somewhere carrying baskets that were as big as cradles …

Once left on my own, I headed farther down the path that we had used to come up into the village … There were no houses anymore on this stretch, just high bushes growing on both sides, making the path quiet and dark. The deep shadow made it feel like evening. Suddenly I thought I had found the place where Vati, as he had told me once long ago, had stopped to rest when he was little. It was Easter and he was delivering a potica to the priest. He pulled the napkin aside and discovered that the potica he was carrying as a gift was full of raisins. Far more than the ones that mother baked at home for them. This made him angry, because he didn’t like the priests. He picked out all of the raisins he could find and ate them, and so the potica he delivered to church was more or less gutted … I could practically see in the dust where he had set the basket down and sat to rest a while, because he wasn’t one of the hardiest boys in the family. That was right here where the path made a broad arc behind a big, bushy shrub, leaving
this side of the shrub quiet and hidden behind lots of big branches, so that truly no one would bother him. But he would have had to be quick if he didn’t want the path to take him around the corner with it and turn him into a stone or a bush … They started to call my name, “Bubi! Bubi!” I had to hurry back if I didn’t want to give my future hiding place away.

The table in the main room had a white tablecloth on it and practically everyone was standing or sitting around it. There was some bright red drink in unusual bottles and in the middle of the table there was a stack of neatly arranged yellow slices of some baked goods. I was as hungry as a dog. When we sat down, I took one of them. It was slightly moist, hard, compact and coarse, and when I bit off some of it, a salty, hard, watery, empty taste filled my mouth. I spat it out. All of them stared at me. Even mother. “Ich meinte, es wäre ein Biskvit,”
^‡
I said. Vati translated. All of them laughed amicably. It was made from corn. Then they poured me some yellow drink that was sour and bitter. I couldn’t force it down. I took Gisela and went out with her to show her what our cousins had shown me … and maybe also the path I’d just discovered.

But barely were we at the fence when they called me again, “Bubi! Bubi!” … Everyone was standing outdoors on the high side of the house, on the hillside of round stones except for the horse stable … Our cousins, Anica too, came galloping back with baskets filled with turnips and carrots. “Der Stritz will, daß du mit Ivan and Ciril zum
Fluß reitest,”
^§
Vati said … Mother, who still appeared to be satisfied with the food and drink, waved her hands, “Nein, nein!” Gisela drew me away when the door opened and she saw the forest of high rear ends in front of her. Everyone all around laughed. I was willing, but seized with fear … Ivan and Ciril boosted me up onto a tall chest … next to their wiriness and agility I was a regular fatso and cry-baby … Then one of them jumped and held onto the horse by the head. The animal was standing before me … tall and powerful, with a bushy blond mane and its brown coat mottled all over. A living, breathing animal, not some papier-mâché horsey on a merry-go-round. How had I missed my chance to get Gisela and myself to that nook by the path where we could have hidden?… Ivan was pushing my feet up on his shoulders. My rectum stretched painfully when I threw one leg over the horse’s back. It was as though I’d mounted a drum. I thought I was going to be torn apart, drawn and quartered … The horse whinnied and tossed back the bright, stifling yarn of its mane. They pushed it backwards out of its stall, where there wasn’t enough room for it to turn around. I lowered my head, but the door still struck me hard enough from behind that I saw stars. Now I hurt at two ends … “Hinunter! Geben Sie ihn hinunter!”
^‖
mother shrieked. Nobody paid her any attention. I would have preferred to jump down, but its hoofs would have trampled me … When the plump, shaggy horse began ambling down the escarpment, everyone looked up. Anica, Stanka,
uncle, Minka looking as though it was funny, Gisela tense, mother all red, Vati casting worried looks in every direction … They finally managed to push the horse onto the path leading uphill. Ciril and Ivan were on the other two, the gray and the other bay … both of them having mounted to my left. The animal was calm, even though its brown, bristling coat seemed to undulate … I held onto it by its mane, but there was also its bridle … Left-left, right-right … Both of my cousins were laughing … I had never been so high up, let alone on something so alive, with its own head and heart … its own will! Actually I enjoyed the fact that everything was happening so fast. Barely would one thing reach its mid-point before the next thing would clip onto it and get underway … And on and on like that … This was a life packed with excitement and adventure!… There was so much I was going to experience here! Row through, ride through! Now this was freedom!… What did the world look like from horseback?… The thatched straw roofs grazed past my feet like carpets and the windows were hidden beneath them like eyes … The path wasn’t a path at all, it was a mixture of sand, puddles and stones. Nobody was going to scold me if I set the world even more on its head. Made castles or holes, rearranged this whole part as I saw fit … Or cleaned it up, because it was full of cow pies and horse droppings and dung heaps and rivulets that trickled down the paths. Everything was exposed, vast, free, everything was allowed … the world was a big toilet under the open sky … A branch of some hanging tree slid over my face, with nothing but tiny little leaves. Right, a willow. I had to half-close my eyes and squint. See this, just like the Indians did. I could feel the horse’s belly
under my rear end, its guts and the movements of their muscles under my calves. This short-haired brown hide was alive for a change, hot and damp, not dead like the hides of Vati’s wild animals … The horse’s ears, pointed and foxlike … flicked near my eyes … This was a parade! Only now did I see the grassy slopes alongside the path as hills, and a bush as a single flower tossed into a canopy of starlike blossoms … As we went Ciril and Ivan introduced me to a bunch of boys, peasants and women … Their voices sounded like trumpets. I would blush when they pointed to me, because I was sitting so high and clumsily … One of the peasants said something and Ivan, or Ciril, who was older, answered, provoking so much laughter I thought they would burst!… I didn’t understand a word. They spoke quickly, abruptly, as if in shouts. Which words? They laughed wholeheartedly and I laughed with them … One, a boy in a hat and holding a hoe, who stood next to the house of that crazy woman, asked something slowly. I tried to look into his eyes under the head covering … He wasn’t satisfied with my cousin’s response. He said something else … something not very friendly, I thought … and at this the two cousins burst out in laughter. Did they mean me … were they trying to hang something ugly on me? The boys in Basel – Italian, French, German … all boys in the world … including these here … were alike … But when we reached the edge of the forest my cousins turned around on their horses and brandished their bridles at the one by the path. Maybe some old feud they had with him?… By the woods we trotted over the railroad tracks. Here, on the other side, next to Karel’s fence with Christ on the cross, was that white, cool house with the new red roof.
On its ground floor terrace, in a corner of its snow-white walls, for no particular reason, stood a tall, beautiful, fire-red vase with a single glorious flower in it. As though it had been placed out for public view in some display window in a city. I could have been both at the same time – the empty space and the big vase – if I could have seen myself from the outside … A young woman dressed in blue had appeared … incredibly beautiful! Like in a fairy tale! Such curls! That smiling face! Her shoulders, her movements, her apron, all of her!… She waved to Ciril and Ivan … and both of them, flushed red with embarrassment and pride, could barely bring themselves to wave back. Her eyes slid over me, too, and in terror I fixed mine on the horse’s mane … Now the horses were walking over that clinking flat surface of stones, of big, flinty eggs, that we had negotiated the night before. But the horses shoved their hooves and horseshoes into the little rocks as though they were nothing, as though they were gliding through the grass and causing sparks … At a bend there were trees whose crowns bent down over us … dark green leaves with swarms of big flies … I shook them off and the horse jumped a little. From now on I’ll have to quietly put up with everything!… Beyond the tree crowns there was a wooden and masonry house … On its terrace were several people looking at me, one of them dressed in city clothes … Thank God some trees rose up again and the stones became damp … And in this context I saw the river. It ate into the bank in a semi-circle, shallow and calm, not wild like during the night … When the horse waded into it up to his belly, the river noisily foamed all around him, so that it felt like looking out from a ship’s prow … and when he lowered his head, I almost slid
down the back of his neck … I didn’t dare get my sandals and stockings wet, but I did, immediately. This was so dangerous – sitting on an animal in the middle of a raging river! In no time other kids had gathered around the inlet and horses … A little girl crouching down with her skirt billowing like a balloon, grinning up at me with a scab on her lips like a dozen frogs … a little imp with his head bandaged … and two or three others who had appeared like Liliputians out of the brush, flung themselves into the water and began splashing each other, squealing, striking its surface with sticks and walking on all fours as though they were swimming … Ciril tossed his shirt and trousers onto his horse’s back. Wearing only his undershorts, in a glorious leap off the horse he dove into the middle of the river …