h
That’s corn.
i
All the beds are stuffed with corn husks.
When I Woke
WHEN I WOKE up and looked out from under the rags, mother and Gisela were still asleep. Even our old aunt was still lying with her scarf over her face and her cane by the bed. Vati was gone from where I was. The stove had gone cold. The sun was shining outside both little windows … more brilliantly, clearly and powerfully than I’d ever before seen it shine anywhere in the world, that could only happen somewhere near Africa … but outside the third window there stretched a long, wet, almost black shadow. I could see trees, vividly green grass, blossoms … tiny ones, big ones, of all different glorious colors. The two pictures over the little cross, of Jesus and Mary pointing to their dripping hearts, still hung there, too, but they were darker than last night, even though the red light was still burning … Wow, at last I was here!.. I was just a little chilly and there was something that smelled sour and wilted. Maybe our aunt. Gisela woke up and mother started shifting around on her corn husks. Then auntie stirred and climbed out of her narrow bed … she slept in a long blue habit, similar to what nuns wear, only it was covered with crosses. She wasn’t big when she got up. Only her nose jutted far out in front of her. Her feet had been bundled up in many layers of yellow rags. The kind that were hanging from the rods over the stove … She looked up in my direction and mother signaled to me emphatically with her eyebrows. I climbed down onto the bench, bowed and said, “Guten Morgen, Tante.” She giggled out loud and the gray eyes in her red, pustular face shone radiantly, in a way that only crazy or very intelligent eyes can shine … Gisela and mother got up. “Wo ist der Vati?”* I asked her. “Er ist mit dem Onkel zum Bahnhof wegen der Koffer gegangen … Ach, wir müssen zum Wasser und auch unser Zeug waschen,”† she complained.… I jumped down … onto the wide floorboards … and over to the window … Beneath it there was nothing but flowers. And such flowers! Lilac, red, orange, black with yellow stripes, tiny satiny flowers … and big ones full of little stars. Aunt was standing in the open doorway with a paring knife in her hand and her face shone in the sun like the shard of a red platter … Then we heard noise approaching the front of the house … Uncle Karel entered the room dressed in black trousers, a green jacket and wearing a hat. Instead of a lantern he was carrying a nice, fat whip over his shoulder. Now, in the daylight, his face was even whiter and his mustache and hair were jet black … His forehead shone like wax. He came up to me and tapped on the windowpane with his whip and said in his youthful voice, “Window!” Maybe he meant the flowers, aunt, the sun, or that I should should go out and wash up. Using his whip, which had little multi-colored braids at its tip, he etched out the whole pane. “Was das?”‡ he asked. “Oh!.. Scheibe, Fenster, fenêtre …”§ I answered. “Window!” he said. I looked at him intently. Maybe around his mouth or his eyes or someplace else on his face he had a dot … a wrinkle … features … something that crept out of his mustache, his eyebrows, his nostrils observing someone and something about me, on my forehead, my cheek or even inside my head. “W-i-n-d-o-w!” he repeated distinctly. I repeated artlessly, hopelessly into the empty room, as though in some school where I knew absolutely nothing, “Vindoh!” … Uncle laughed his head off. I wanted out of there as soon as possible. But he stopped me. He got down on his knees and used the whip to pull something like slippers out from under the bench … in fact they were clogs that had been made out of worn-out shoes with no upper parts. “For you,” he said … So these were for me, I understood. My sandals really were just heaps of caked mud …
What was just on the other side of the door wasn’t an entryway, but a kitchen where our suitcases were standing … Inside the black hole where last night coals had been glowing they baked bread. This ingenious device was an invention worthy of Indians … Inside that wide, dark tunnel they heated the house, baked bread, fried things, cooked them in pots, Vati explained to mother. The hole in the wall got wider the farther in it went and on the other side it expanded into a stove as big as a monument that simultaneously kept the room warm, served as a sleeping space and even a drying area … “Wenn wir uns so einen Ofen und Herd in Basel leisten könnten, hätten wir viel Geld gespart.”‖ That was true. But when I looked inside at its walls shimmering with heat and saw a heap of glimmering embers, I remembered the witch from the gingerbread house and I pulled my head out of there right away … From out of one corner Aunt Mica took one of several long poles that had a wide wooden ring on the end. Onto it she slapped a whole mountain of dough no smaller than an infant … She showed us how she put the paddle into the oven and then yanked it back out from under the loaf of dough … I soon looked away …
There was also a black table and a heavy bench in the kitchen, and a cupboard with a bin for flour, and black pots of lard. And it had two doors. One that we had come in through the night before, and the other where there were steps, uneven logs, outside which we’d stood when father tapped on the pane with his branch. There were nettles growing up out of those steps, a whole grove of them with pretty, milk-colored blossoms. Which meant that nobody used that door … I hurried over to look at it, I was excited that green things grew right into the house, just like in some exotic hut …
Then Uncle Karel opened the door across from the room with the stove. It was a whole place of its own, new, shiny, just whitewashed and big … Some spattered wallboards lay on the floor, along with buckets, a shovel, some sand … “Da werden wir wohnen,”a I told mother. “Gehört das Zimmer uns?”b I asked, full of hope and doubt. “Ja, Vati hat etwas Geld geschickt aus der Schweiz, daß es der Onkel gebaut hat …”c So it was ours! I ran inside. A small screened window seemed somehow familiar to me. Yes, I had walked past it last night! Proudly I closed the door, which also seemed almost new … Uncle Karel pointed to some stairs that led up to the ceiling. He pushed open a hatch at the top … Here in the attic there was a veritable jumble of things — half storage, half butcher shop. Sausages, salamis, and reddish brown shanks — hams — hung on lines from the rafters … “a veal shank,” said Vati. A whole calf’s leg complete with hoof and whiskers dangled in front of my face, as though from a gallows … On the floor there were pumpkins, some sort of troughs, a wooden wheel on a rope … Oh, if only I could have understood the language in which Karel was explaining things to Vati. When we went outside, the surroundings were completely different from the way they’d been the previous night … A river, dark green, extended across to a dark forest that grew a few meters from the shore on the far side … It was incredible how disciplined the trees were about stopping just shy of the water! That gave me something to think about … And the grass underfoot that was bright green and still full of dewdrops.
The unusual piece of equipment outside the house consisted of a block on two legs, a beam, a spindle with a wiry rope and a bucket with a dish-like little roof over it. It was Karel’s invention! He showed it to us first thing: he turned a crank, like on automobiles … and the bucket took off down a wire and splashed into the water, which was a milky green from all the branches of bushes it had torn off in the storm … then he turned the crank in reverse, producing squeaks that reached to the far shore and up to high heavens … returning the bucket, now full of water which uncle used for the livestock, and setting it back on the shelf under its little roof. The only thing missing was for it to salute you! This was a real revolution!.. But in addition to this apparatus there was also a well in front of the house with water you could drink. When we bent over it, our heads met against the backdrop of the sunny sky on its round watery bottom as if on a golden platter … So many different things in such a small space! The casks and kettles standing on stones were pots that they cooked carrots and turnips in, then used blocks mounted on sticks to mix and strain them for the pigs … Between this house and the neighboring house, which was much uglier, there was a handsome rooster, a glorious bird, standing atop a black heap of leaves and animal manure. His hens, as they pierced the surroundings with their eyes, pecked their way over to Gisela and me, showing no fear of us … Then followed their chicks, little balls of yellow fluff that kept tumbling over the leaves. We reached our fingers out toward them, but uncle and aunt said something to each other and turned away, as though we’d done something bad …