The next day all four of us sat waiting for the head of the Gypsy horse to appear at the window, with the Gypsy woman sitting on the box … Everything had been closed, locked and secured with padlocks … There was nobody else in the house … We climbed through the window to get to the outhouse. I could barely turn my head … everything was still boiling inside me, and everything was broken. The Gypsy woman drove to the back of the house, practically overturning the wagon on the steep slope … Karel had forbidden any Gypsies to approach the house from the front … We handed all our luggage out through the window … the comforter, the suitcases (canvas, cardboard and round), a bag of laundry, the steel strongbox, the pipes we had removed from the stove, because they were ours … and set it on the wagon. Mother made a stack of a sweater, some skirts, a pair of shoes and the straw tick for the Gypsy woman, who examined them closely … held them up in the sunlight, unfolded them, tried on the shoes … She wasn’t satisfied with what she’d been given, it wasn’t adequate payment for her effort … All the way to the train stop she muttered angrily and complained in her language … we went around the house through the fence by the postman’s house … past Poldka’s little house … the engineer’s villa … down over the long road past the blacksmith’s … There was nobody anywhere, except for some kids in some yards … Because the little wagon was so fragile and the diminutive horse so skinny we didn’t ride in the cart … It went slowly. It took an effort to reach each of the trees along the way, one after the other. Over and over … It was raining buckets when we reached Ljubljana that night and Vati met us on the platform. The streetcars had stopped running, and he couldn’t take us and the luggage home with him on foot … So he ran out to hail a taxi … He argued with the driver over the fare. Finally the driver agreed. By then we were soaked through to the skin … A black, square car with red arrows for turn signals on both sides drove up to where we were … It had a huge spare tire on the running board blocking the rear door … so we all had to pile in through the door on the other side … The train station vanished along with its lights … Despite the rain I could feel the wheels revolving along the asphalt. Thank God, we were back in the city!.. The driver turned on the overhead light. Now we couldn’t see anything outside anymore. That little light set in felt captivated me … maybe because I was sitting between the seats on the floor … The taxi swayed as it drove into the black hole of night, full of the downpour and gritty puddles that spattered the windshield and windows … on the sides, at the back, in the front … “Mein Zimmer liegt weit draußen in der Umgebung der Stadt,”† Vati said.
*
Keep still!
†
My room is way out on the outskirts.
All He Had
ALL HE HAD was a black pot, a plate and utensils for one person. The bed, a table, a chair and the stove in his basement room had been borrowed and belonged to the landlord. “Ein pensionierter Zahlmeister — bei der Marine,”* he explained. The only furnishings that were ours were the wicker chest and the sewing machine that Clairi had brought with her from Switzerland.
The first morning we got up very early … The first thing I actually saw through the window was a miracle. A miracle of red roses entwining some green sticks that had crystal balls on them amid the thorns, reflecting the sky’s blue and the blue house … Right across from the window, which was barely an inch up off the sandy ground!.. I had to get outdoors as soon as possible … “Paß auf!” mother put a hand on my shoulder in warning … My God, the house was so big, three stories tall … Blue, with its windows and doors outlined in white and white bands at the corners. It stood on a big lot of white sand that was neatly and carefully raked … Behind the flowers there was a round pond full of water and a wooden gazebo painted green … The trees behind it were arrayed in thick grass that had been well soaked by the previous night’s rain. The road was visible on the far side of an iron gate set in a high, sculpted hedge … God, where had we come to? A castle, a villa, the estate of some wealthy count? I didn’t dare move from the spot … As though I had downed some concoction, starch?… I just stood there. But there was something else … something that flickered and buzzed in the air … What was it? I couldn’t guess. Behind the house in the middle of the sandy yard there was a big green well, with a gigantic handle jutting out like a train signal … To one side of it, tucked away, was a shed made of boards and white cardboard. I didn’t dare go there yet … That’s where the forest began, which probably wasn’t big … and at the edge of the forest was a wooden hut, an outhouse, and a lime pit. Behind the gazebo, from the lime pit on, a narrow path led alongside the woods to a brown chapel. The Chapel of St. Roch with his dog … The saint was depicted in the garb of a Roman soldier with a sword made of mosaic tiles. He was standing in a desert and pointing to a wound on his thigh. He had blue eyes with rings around the pupils … No matter if I stepped to the right or the left, the saint’s eyes followed me … I went on … behind the hedge was another road, full of dust that intersected with the first one behind the iron gate.
I watched Vati while he shaved, washed from a bucket and put on a celluloid collar. He and Clairi took off for town. To the Elite factory. Just for one day, so she could help him catch up on his backlog … Once they left, we could move quite comfortably around the room … But I ran after them. So I could see more! I walked with them to the intersection of two roads, where there was a smithy in some courtyard and a light affixed to a telegraph pole … They were going down the main road that led straight past fields of grain and clover into town … From there I saw the castle on the hill again, as I had a year before. The grayish brown walls with the square tower and green cupola and the bell tower of who knows what church down below.… Here on the righthand side there was a wall running through the wheat and potato fields into the distance. A path past a gravel pit that had a wheelless wooden wagon in it led that direction. Crosses and tombstones jutted up over the wall. So this was a cemetery …
But the most unusual thing of all was the air, which shimmered … It smelled of water, which must have been flowing full force and in huge quantities through some riverbed somewhere close by … It smelled of the rocks and vegetation that must grow there. Was this why the trees quavered in the air like reflections in water? Some sort of noise surrounded my head on account of it: everything shimmered, moved, trembled, scratched, swarmed, repeatedly making contact in a repeating vision … As though instead of the treetops there was a creature perched on the trees … nature itself, with the folds of its vegetation exposed on all sides … There, in that wet field, in the dense shadow of the trees on the far side of the pond, I was suddenly on some separate planet: quiet, light, mute, unhearing, with no resonance and no echo … How was this possible? As though this was no longer me … This quiet space was somehow contained between the corner of a small stand of forest and a gap in the hedge where, beginning on the far side of a small bench, some quarried rocks lay scattered alongside the road: but from there on, beginning at a house with no stucco and the same gravel pit where I’d seen the gray wagon, that noise and the shimmering of the clear air came back and enveloped me …