†
These are the sons of your Uncle Joseph who live up in the village.
‡
We’re going up to visit your Uncle Joseph now. They’re already expecting us.
§
That’s where an old crazy woman lives, according to Karel. That’s all of her stuff in front of the house.
This Latter Turned Out
THIS 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.