Newcomers (18 page)

I
SHOULD HAVE KNOWN:
as soon as mother and Vati were together, the complaints, accusations, shouting and arguments would begin again … “Warum hast du damals die Schweizer Staatsbürgerschaft nicht angenommen? Warum hast du damals diesen Lieferanten alles Geld anvertraut? Warum bist du damals nicht in die Gewerbekammer eingetreten?”
^*
And Vati’s grumbling, which got louder and louder … he would start by talking quietly to himself in some corner, getting ready for the alarm, drilling for the fight … and then … I knew it from the rue de Bourg … from the Gerbergässli … from rue Helder … I knew all the arguments and counter-arguments by heart, alway pronounced in precisely the same way, they were like mummies and couldn’t hurt me. I held my hands over my ears. What I heard was always the same: the voices pitched high and low, thundering and whimpering, and the crash of various objects that seemed to get hung onto them … the iron, a hammer, scissors, wood blocks for fur hats … then fell and started rolling around … Once when I was still little I saw both of them, holding hands, fall to the floor … and then get up again. I thought they were playing. No, they were
wrestling each other. Vati stood upright, his eyes bulging, shaking his clenched fist at mother like the handle of a ladle. And mother, red in the face and smaller, whimpering, shouting, and shuffling through the room. It happened more and more often that I would come floating in somebody’s arms … mother’s, Clairi’s, Gritli’s … into the blizzard surrounding Vati … and, because everybody was afraid of him and shouting at him, I shoved my fist at his shoulder and his shaggy face, causing his spectacles to fall like saucers … When the fight died down, mother came to me all in tears. She would sing some song to entertain me, or Vati would unwrap a little piece of cheese from some silver paper. Essentially they both had a heart, as did I, only that’s not what counts in life. Mother and Vati … were the kind of couple about which anyone could have instantly said that they didn’t belong together. Uncle Jožef was a little, scornful man and his wife was a tiny, malicious woman. Mrs. Baloh was small and pious and Mr. Baloh too was short and a believer. Enrico’s mother was dark-haired and pretty, just as her husband the bricklayer was handsome and swarthy … But mother and Vati didn’t fit together in any respect. Not in their hands or their feet or in their faces or postures, they didn’t even go together in the way they worked. Only in their anger and bickering … Even now. Especially when they learned from whoever it was about my adventure on the Sava. I could have drowned! Both of them were beside themselves … Who was responsible? Him, for spending his days sewing at Elite, which had unceremoniously fired him, or her, for being at home all day anyway? Her, because she wasn’t minding us, or him, because he didn’t earn enough to buy her even a meter of
firewood?… And again they started throwing things at each other … boxes, covers, promotional scissors that Vati got for free at the autumn fair. Clairi quickly closed the door and stayed standing in front of it. She covered the door, I covered the window, in order to insulate our walls, to separate them from the world, to prevent them from pushing their way out of our little room into the hallway … Each of them on their own, that was still manageable, but not together. The greater the distance between them, the better it was for both of them and the rest of us, too … When Vati showed up in the cornfield on his way home from Elite, that meant the beginning of a difficult hour, a regular hurricane. Or: when I was having a good time being with him and she came limping up wearing her floral smock, all red in the face, that meant the good time was over.

Out in front of the house, where there was some grass to walk on, the women usually sat sewing or knitting, with the owner’s housemaid working on some embroidery. The first few days we were there mother joined them with her sewing. She had curled her hair for the occasion and ironed her smock. She felt a little awkward on account of her legs, which were covered with the black balloons of her varicose veins, so she hid them under the bench. But she was most ashamed of her toothless mouth, because of the stumps and the worn-down fillings. Whenever one of them asked her something with a German word, a gesture, or laughter … she would cover her mouth with her hand … It was good for the poor thing to be able to spend some time in company and chat with people at least a little bit … But on the days after that she didn’t want to go back onto the lawn. She stayed
in our room. That was a bad sign … Gisela picked flowers around where the women were sitting. With her long hair and in her little brown dress with its yellow polka dots she was so cute that the women sitting there couldn’t help calling her over, passing her around from lap to lap and fondling her … Mother sat on pins and needles at her sewing machine without touching it. “Was haben sie dich gefragt?”
^†
she asked as soon as Gisela came back in. Where is her daddy? And whether we really left our furniture from Switzerland at the railway station?… Mother turned pale. “Habe ich dir nicht gesagt …”
^‡
She sat down on the bed. She was going to explode any second, I could tell, or else faint … Oh, she was prepared to sew anybody a dress, a blouse or whatever for free, just as long as they didn’t start nosing around. And now that had happened … Her face shook with rage, but also with fear. That was infectious. I could even feel it start to fill me … Was I supposed to cut myself off from the world just like that? From the courtyard, from the Sava, the woods?… Mother no longer left the room if she heard the women outdoors. And if it happened that she ventured outside when they happened to be there, she dashed into the woods or the garden as fast as though lightning were striking all around her … She stopped going for water, too. Particularly ever since the morning when she caught one of the Pestotnik boys at the trough. He was lurking there with a ten-inch knife, waiting to ambush one of Štef’s younger brothers as soon as he showed and take
his revenge for having thrashed him with a wooden board the night before … “Das sind alle nur mordsüchtige Luder,”
^§
she whimpered as she lay on the bed. For the first time in my life I tried to comfort her. It was more powerful than me. I put my hand on her shoulder … “Warum sind wir hierhergekommen? Wo wir doch die Wahl gehabt haben, nach Deutschland oder Jugoslawien zu übersiedeln,”
^‖
she said without feeling me touching her … She would stand motionless at the door or the window. She was trying to listen. “Was sagen sie wieder? Über was lachten sie eben?”
^a
She wouldn’t wait for me to translate. She understood the language like music … bangs, splashing, some bells tolling … Mocking … overjoyed … most of all threatening. “Sie werden mir einmal etwas anstellen, weil ich Deutsche bin.”
^b
The women began to complain about Gisela and me. About me because I had spilled water from the bucket onto the steps. And about Gisela because she had dug up all the sand with her little pail and shovel. Because we played with boats that I folded from paper at the pond when the owner was away … The women pointed out the steps to the maid, whom they didn’t like because she was the owner’s lover, as well as the sand excavated down to the dirt in the yard … Old Mrs. Baloh went to complain to the landlord because I had dragged a whole tree crown from the forest into our room, dropping leaves and branches in the vestibule on the way … Mother was
called upstairs. When she came back, she turned and shouted, “Das möchte ich sagen: ihr seid alle unverschämte Leute!…” Gisela and I dragged her inside … she was as strong as a motorcycle. Then she punished us. She struck Gisela on the hand and then she slapped me in the face, her full wooden mask, and then she thrashed me with the bamboo cane that Vati used to beat animal skins. Everybody in the house could hear the stick whistling through the air and me wailing. “Nichts anstellen! Und wenn dich einer etwas fragt, nach mir rufen …”
^c
I told her that was easier said than done. If somebody asked me something in the woods, what was I supposed to do? “Das wird die Mama antworten …”
^d
From then on Gisela was supposed to play with her pail by the window, so that mother could have her in view the whole time. If anybody stopped and spoke to her, mother would stick her head out the window. “Was möchten Sie von dem Kind?”
^e
she would call out irritably.

Whenever she ran into somebody she didn’t like when we were out gathering firewood, she would disappear quickly into the denser brush. Others she would nod to from a distance, and some she would greet with a Guten Tag. There were just a few she would stop for a moment and chat with, but for no longer than she herself saw fit. I tried to ascertain from the people … by how attractive they were, or their age or their clothes … why she afforded some of them more friendliness and others none at all … Even afterwards I could never
figure out her behavior … and I couldn’t depend on her opinions, which weren’t even interesting in the tiniest bit … Women who weren’t yet mothers were the same with everyone … a kind of perpetual source of universal kindness … But mothers, no. They were tight-lipped and stern … stupid or the kind that constantly sang … still others that carried themselves like athletes or nuns … and some whom their children obeyed at the twitch of an eyebrow or who shouted their throats out at them … Only Enrico’s mother was friendly and quiet, like the image of a real mother in paintings … All of mother’s attempts to socialize with people or hide from them went over my head … but I had to keep pace with her like a locomotive … Out in a clearing she ripped through old clothes set out on newspapers and made new ones out of them. For Clairi, for herself, for Gisela, for me. With amazing speed! She would glance curiously up at the new four-story building where Mrs. Gmeiner lived … She was a German. She would have liked to make contact with her. As soon as possible … She waited for the right opportunity, she didn’t want to be pushy, the opportunity had to come of its own. I understood this … When she had washing to do, she did it far away from the others, on the far side of the lime pit, practically in the woods. She hung the laundry up on rope stretched between tree limbs, half in the sun, half in the shade. “Bleib bei der Wäsche, daß sie sie nicht schmutzig machen oder stehlen.”
^f
I sat under the laundry … thank God other boys also sat under their mothers’ laundry, so this wasn’t anything strange or
unusual. For instance Enrico, with whom I talked a lot. He told me about the harbor in Trieste, where he’d been. About the sea and how enormous it was. About waves as high as a six-story building, about seagoing diseases. He knew his ships well. Navigating them, too. He had seen a three-master that had collided with lighthouses and sailed into port without its mainmast … Some steamship covered in frost that freighted nothing but huge ice blocks from Russia. And submarines! And fast, white torpedo boats with projectiles that sped through the water to sink submarines …

On Saturdays I scrubbed the room. Mother went to sit and sew on a bench that was near some quarried cliffs where all of us residents were allowed to go, but few ever did. Occasionally she wrote to Margrit or to her relatives in Neunkirchen. She would leave the paper on the bench and pace around with her hands in the pockets of her smock. That’s when she would be thinking about what lines she might add to her letter. First she thought about them, then she wrote them. Sometimes she even recited the lines out loud, changing the sequence of the words … Once the room was dry, Gisela and I would spread mother’s embroidered floral tablecloth on the table and set a bottle with a flower on it. To cover the opening on the stove I cut a lace napkin out of paper. Even though all of it was going to have to disappear from the table and stovetop in half an hour. But for a little while the room looked like it had been assembled from a kit.

Vati only went out to the woods now and then to get some fresh air. Usually for no more than an hour, because he had so little time. He liked for me to go with him. He wouldn’t say anything as I walked
alongside him. He kept quiet. He didn’t ask any questions, either. I should have asked him some, but didn’t. Sometimes he’d exchange a few words with a worker out spreading gravel on the road or some woman working in her garden. If we did exchange any words, it wasn’t in Basel dialect, but this new, Slovene language that I was gradually learning. This changed him into some other person. What sort? More accessible, or less?… I couldn’t figure it out … The new language we spoke to each other was something peculiar. Like some unfamiliar, half-cooked, still raw food in my mouth. If we had wanted to tell each other what we thought of the unpeeled potatoes we were just then chewing on, whether they were edible or not, we could have found no better way of expressing it. I already knew a few words and what they meant. Except that they still lacked a heart and a mind … Not far from the new four-story house there was a clearing full of tree stumps. That’s where we sat. Vati had on his only good suit, a blue one, with a necktie under his celluloid collar, the only one he could afford. He had his own way of keeping it clean, white and like new … He would work two or three layers of a special wax for dying hides into its cracks … That held for at least three months … and protected it from impurities in the air, fingerprints and sweat. He used that same lotion, which had a cellulose base, to treat the linen collars of his two other shirts … In the clearing he took out a pocket knife with a thick red wooden handle that he had bought at the train station … this was the most Slovenian thing about him. He used it to trim his nails, which grew fast, yellow and curved like the windows of old taxi cabs … The rage that possessed him when he was talking with mother or Clairi
subsided … Outwardly he was quiet and said very little … He walked slowly, with his hands clasped behind his back, far away from the houses, way out in front of me … a bit off to the side, uncertainly, as though he were stepping over shards or avoiding bugs or puddles on the road. His feet would recoil and his ankles would twist, causing his soles to twitch right and left before he set a foot back down on the ground … I had to call to him and only then would he stop and wait for me to catch up with him. He said nothing. I would barely catch up with him before he turned around and went on. Was he a kind man or what was actually the story with him? I wanted something to happen. “Laufen wir!”
^g
I shouted. I took him by the hand and raced off down the road with him. But after a few meters he would lag and say, “Laß mich los! Laß mich los,”
^h
and sit down, all out of breath … His lungs worked like a rotten bellows and a dry froth appeared on his lips … He was completely gray, as old as a grandpa. He was fifty-five years old, as I reckoned, when I arrived … and mother almost fifty … That was a Methuselamian age … somewhere way up ahead in life, or way at the back … He didn’t like me to be too energetic … If I started jumping over a stick that I kept setting higher and higher, he turned and looked away. In the past he would at least pay attention when I showed him how agile I was, but not anymore. I wanted to learn something from him … whatever it was … that would be essential to me in life. I didn’t know what to ask him about that he
would know how to answer. Yes, he knew a few things about Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Roosevelt … But of course he knew nothing about military affairs … armored vehicles, bombers, and fighter planes … submarines … various kinds of rifles and automatic pistols … what their trajectory was and how to handle them … All of that was important for war! So that’s why I described the specifications of various kinds of weaponry and waited for some spark of curiosity from him. It didn’t much interest him … It wasn’t possible to convert him. He was different from others. In every way. Nobody else had such a tiny, fragile frame. He was handsome … Handsomer than in his photograph with mother where they were sitting in wicker chairs, holding onto little, fat-headed three-year-old Clairi between them … or than he was in the yellowed group portrait at the end of his tailoring course in Trieste, where he stood lined up with other young tailors in an auditorium, surrounded by old, stout master tradesmen sitting at little tables with tape measures and protractors. Thin, with sideburns and a thick mustache … A handsome, elderly face with a beard … it was amazing how much he resembled the patriarchs in church paintings … His light green eyes behind glasses that he repaired using yarn would dart this way and that, big and expectant if anything darted past, or they would suddenly become cleverly focused when he fixed them on something that interested him, for instance a fur. I would look at him, because, quite simply, he was always silent … Sometimes he would exercise a bit … He would hop extending his arms up and down … which looked funny, like some sort of running in place. I would quietly check around to see if
there were people nearby who might laugh at him if they caught him doing that.